Fletch - the man with many names

 










Fletch (1985)

I used to love this movie when I was younger but for some reason I hadn't seen it in ages, before I found this and the one below in a bargain bin of a local market. So I decided to give them another go, funnily enough I wasn't actually hoping this one being that good anymore. Much to my surprise I still found myself liking it quite a bit. Fletch (Chevy Chase) is an undercover reporter investigating the drug trafficking on the local beach. There a wealthy man, Alan Stanwyk (Tim Matheson), spots him and proposes a deal to him. The deal is that Fletch needs to murder him for 50.000 dollars. The catch is that mr. Stanwyk is suffering from bone cancer and doesn't want to go through a slow and painful death. A murder would leave a large amount of insurance money for his family where a suicide wouldn't leave them anything. Fletch agrees to the deal, but smells something fishy and the movie gets it's mystery plot moving. I quite liked the dry and cynical humour of it all, I actually remembered it being a bit more goofball, but was pleasantly surprised. The best thing about this movie is that you can take all the comedy out and still you're left with a somewhat intriguing crime mystery, so the comedy doesn't make the movie, it just supports it nicely. This movie was done in the wake of the success of Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and you can see some clear similarities to this one. One of the biggest being the brilliant soundtrack by Harold Faltermeyer, who made the soundtrack of Beverly Hills Cop as well. Sure it's extremely 80's and rather repetitive, but still I loved the funky themes of it. Anyway I liked this movie surprisingly much.
75%

 









Fletch Lives (1989)

This time Fletch inherits a mansion in Louisiana from his aunt, so he decides to quit his job and enjoy the country life for a change. But as someone kills his lawyer while Fletch is sleeping next to her, he ends up in trouble with the locals and we have another mystery. This was nowhere near as good as the first one, even though this one had it's moments as well. The story is the biggest problem, it's not as good or interesting as in the first one. The weird thing is that they didn't use any of the novels written by the original author Gregory McDonald for this sequel, even though there were plenty of them, but instead hired Leon Capetanos to write a completely new story for it. Now I haven't read any of those, so can't judge, but it does sound a bit weird to not use the original author and as the end result isn't great I'm willing to bet my money on some of them being better than this. Another thing that troubled me was the editing, at points it was absolutely horrible with very clear editing mistakes. Which is weird as Richard A. Harris has won an Oscar and worked on some very nicely edited movies. I'm guessing the studio had their hands on the editing as they saw the movie didn't really work that well. Anyway, it's not all bad, there's still some hilarious moments in this one as well and I didn't get bored with it. But in the end it's just an average sequel to a good movie.
51%