No./18 Why Fletch is the right hero for now
Thirty-five years after the Chevy Chase original, Jon Hamm is giving the comedy-thriller a none-more-timely reboot
WELL, IT FINALLY happened. After years of false starts, Hollywood managed to find the right creative team to reboot Fletch, with Superbad’s Greg Mottola directing and Mad Men star Jon Hamm slipping into the role which nearly provided Chevy Chase with his very own Beverly Hills Cop-style franchise back in the mid-’80s (a much-derided sequel, 1989’s Fletch Lives, brought that plan to a screeching and unfortunate halt). With the right touch, this 21st-century Fletch has the chance to be not just nostalgia porn, but the dry-witted hero we need and deserve.
As captured in both Gregory Mcdonald’s successful series of novels and Michael Ritchie’s 1985 film, Irwin M. ‘Fletch’ Fletcher is an investigative reporter whose nose for trouble and dedication to the common man frequently lead him to the juiciest stories. Crooked millionaires, corrupt cops, insufferable high-society types — these are the sort of people whose spots Fletch lives to blow up on the front page of the LA Times, and he is very good at it. How refreshing it will be, in our current climate, to see a film where a member of the press is a capable, swaggering hero.
The new Fletch also arrives amidst a newly renewed interest in whodunnits — a genre that’s laid mostly dormant over the past decade or two, but which has seen a recent resurgence in popularity thanks to Rian Johnson’s Knives Out and Kenneth Branagh’s Murder On The Orient Express (both of which were successful enough to earn sequels).
With the character’s talent for weaponised snark and cynical attitude towards authority combined with the undeniable charisma of Hamm, the new Fletch may be precisely the right hero for this moment in time: a champion of the working class whose dedication to throwing society’s biggest bastards under the bus might make him as heroic to today’s audiences as any superhero. Let’s just hope they bring in Harold Faltermeyer to write the score.