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Fletch
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Universal Pictures Review written by and copyright: Jeremiah Chin (1st July 2009). |
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The Film
 Labels like ‘cult film’ or ‘cult classic’ seem to get thrown around far too often, more like indicating a strong home video/DVD/Blu-ray performance rather than an actual cult-like following. The most blatant indicator would be whether or not your product can inspire a whole fandom’s way of life and thinking; inspiring fan conventions, huge call and response crowds for showings of the film, or even promoting a whole philosophy like people who have seriously followed ‘jedi’ as a religious order after “Star Wars” (1977) or a sort of dude-ism after the dude abided in “The Big Lebowski” (1998). But there are also the cult classics that are simply films that are brilliant, yet their rabid fans insist they never got the respect they deserve, or are so awesomely-amazingly-Nicolas Cage-frighteningly “Wicker Man” (2004) bad that they deserve a status of high respect. Or they just have Pam Grier in a lead role, which is enough for me. After seeing “Fletch” (1985) I started putting myself in a cult movie mindset considering I’ve always heard about the movie and how funny Chevy Chase is, but never bothered to see it. Only to be disappointed by the cult classic label thrown at the film since it doesn’t quite have the staying power to hold up for me in an age when Judd Apatow’s gang of quick witted, improv styled, Fletch-like actors are dominating the comedy scene. Plus Fletch is a huge Lakers fan (even though it’s in the days of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson, while Kobe Bryant gives the entire history of the team a bad taste in my mouth). Chase plays the titular Fletch, an undercover reporter working on a news story about some drug deals going down on one of L.A.’s beaches. Pretending to be a homeless junkie, Fletch gets picked up by Alan Stanwyk (Tim Matheson) with an offer to murder him, in is own home, and make it look like a failed robbery for $50,000 and a plane ticket out of the country. Smelling a setup, Fletch begins to investigate the story of Stanwyk and his supposed bone cancer in order to uncover his real story by donning a series of made up identities and using his quick wits and attitude to push him into wherever he needs to go to get the scoop. In the process of working on both the drug and murder stories at once, Fletch gets caught up in a web of police corruption, threatened by the police to keep quiet and threatened by his editor to get his story in on time without getting fired. And there’s a dream sequence where Chase wears an afro and pretends to be on the Lakers. If this is the movie that’s supposed to define classic Chevy Chase I’m having trouble seeing where he was funny in the first place. The film doesn’t hold up over time at all, mostly devoid of really good jokes it depends on just some quick lines from Chase, but the funny lines are incredibly few and far between. Each of the costumes is supposed to look ridiculous, though most of them are just Chase wearing a different outfit to suit the occupation he’s matching to or the area he’s trying to get in to. Sure, one of his pseudonyms is John Cocktoastin, but this movie makes me yearn for the kind of gag comedy that David Zucker, Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams made famous in this era. Chase’s comedy career dies come the 1990’s and it’s not hard to see why considering that it may have been the celebrity of his generation and affiliation with early “Saturday Night Live” (1975- present) that propelled him to comedy fame. At the same time I have to wonder whether or not it was simply the little things in the movie that made me dislike it so much. Like the little amount of laughs (zing!) or the ultra annoying, ultra repetitive 80’s synth soundtrack that plays every five seconds in the movie. This is where most people would make a joke about it being torture, or the Geneva convention, or something topical like "Gitmo", but I think watching “Fletch” has just about sucked the comedy right out of me and I don’t want to be reduced to Jay Leno style jokes (zing again!). The writing and directing are very quiet in the movie, as they don’t seem to help or hurt the plot or Chase’s comedy at all, they just all sit fairly limp and lifeless on the screen. I respect the fact that the film tries to be a sort of mystery and comedy at the same time, a police procedural sort of film tightly wrapped up in many stabs at comedy. Whether it’s because “Fletch” is too far removed from my own sense of humor, or that Chevy Chase just wasn’t as funny as people remember, “Fletch” doesn’t even come close to the praise it receives. It lacks the over-the-top craziness or wit that could even create a great comedic movie, but instead relies on Chase to generate comedy every few minutes through improvised and snappy lines that just don’t hold up.
Video
Other than mundane comedy, “Fletch” boasts one of the laziest Blu-ray transfer’s I’ve seen, keeping so much grain and noise in the frame, especially on darker colors, that it makes the 1080p 24/fps 1.85:1 aspect ratio with VC-1 encoding look absolutely terrible. The film’s look lacks any of the standards of a high-definition transfer, as the quality of the video looks below DVD or even standard definition TV quality during the film, though the menus look oddly clear. A bad transfer for a bad film that doesn’t have much to visually offer to begin with.
Audio
The annoying soundtrack doesn’t get much better of a treatment with the English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track mixed at 48kHz/24-bit. The DTS-HD audio adds no crispness to the sounds and makes me feel like all of my speakers had thick towels thrown over them before the movie started. The sounds come across as flat, except for the sharp twinges of pain the fiftieth time the main synth line repeats, and the dialogue isn’t any crisper. Again a poor example of the power of Blu-ray in an audio transfer that almost sounds bootlegged. Optional subtitles are included in English for the hearing impaired, French and Spanish.
Extras
The film comes with only three featurettes, a theatrical trailer and BD-live content, something that I didn’t expect for a supposedly classic comedy film as no one seemed to deem the film worthy for anything like a commentary. “Just Charge it to the Underhills: Making and Remembering ‘Fletch’” featurette runs for 26 minutes and 34 seconds. In this attempted tribute to "Fletch", with about the same video quality as the film, the disc producer tries to make himself the star of this featurette, sitting down with the producers about creating the film, supplemented with some photos of the film and interviews with a handful of the supporting cast members. I’m fairly impressed with how many of the original people involved with the film they managed to bring in, but at the same time there’s no Chevy Chase and the way the featurette is told in making the disc producer a star of it, it seems too self serving and gets annoying fairly quickly. “From John Cocktoastin to Harry S. Truman: The Disguises” runs for 4 minutes and 54 seconds. This featurette seems to be one giant praise of the production crew and Chevy Chase’s own improvisational skills. Before the featurette I thought it was supposed to be a joke how poor the disguises look, but it seems like many of the crew and cast take them seriously, when the entire film it just seems like Chevy Chase in different suits with some wigs thrown in. “Favorite ‘Fletch’ Moments” featurette runs for 2 minutes and 37 seconds, and just runs as a sort of greatest hits of the different moments in the film, and worked a lot better than the full 90 minutes of film. The theatrical trailer runs for 1 minute and 32 seconds. There’s also a BD-live feature for profile 2.0 enabled players with an internet connection. This includes a "User Guide" for BD-live which runs for 47 seconds.
Overall
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