Undercover Journalism At Its Finest
Chevy Chase is Irwin Fletcher, aka Fletch, an investigative news reporter for an LA newspaper with a talent for getting the information he needs to uncover the true story. Fletch’s charm and ability to disguise himself and stay cool under tremendous pressure and through a battery of awkward situations is what makes Fletch so successful, real, and entertaining at the same time.
Fletch’s adventure begins on a beach in LA, where he is working a drug case. Meanwhile, a local wealthy man named Alan Stanwyk, played by Tim Matheson, is keeping track of Fletch and invites Fletch to come over to his house to hear him out on a proposal. The proposal involves helping Stanwyk kill himself while making it look like a burglary. Fletch’s reward is several thousand dollars and a ticket out of LA while things cool down, but Fletch is suspicious and decides to look more into Stanwyk’s life as there just doesn’t seem to be a logical explanation as to why Stanwyk would want to die.
In his investigation, Fletch uncovers a ring of corrupt cops, lies, and betrayal that nearly gets him killed, but he’s able to keep his cool, wit, and humor the entire time. The film Fletch is one of those that I can watch many times a year; it has a great replay value due to the excellent performance of Chevy Chase. The script also lends itself to much repeated viewing too; it’s peppered with action, comedy, and well, more comedy — it’s superb.
Fletch Comes To Blu-ray
Being an older film, you might expect 1985’s Fletch to look pretty bad on Blu-ray. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting anything really impressive, but I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised by the image quality of Fletch. While it’s not the best looking movie on Blu-ray, it does look significantly better than my DVD version. There are some instances of grain, but by and large the colors are vibrant and the images are crisp and sharp.
For audio, including the excellent theme song by Harold Faltermeyer, there is a DTS-HD 5.1 track. Most of this film is dialogue driven, but everything sounds great, no complaints.
For extra features, there aren’t many, but what is included is nice. Let’s take a look:
–BDLive- The BDLive feature, at least this time, is nothing more than a link to Universal’s BDLive portal where you can view lots of trailers for other Universal releases.
–My Scenes – You can create clips of your favorite scenes and share them on BDLive.
–Just Charge It To the Underhills: Making And Remembering Fletch – A twenty-six minute SD feature that includes some humor but is primarily meant as a way to present the viewer some old interviews with various cast and crew of the film. Unfortunately missing is Chevy Chase himself, but the interviewees include the Screenwriter, Producers, and several co-stars including Matheson.
–From John Cocktoastin To Harry S. Truman: The Disguises – A brief, nearly five minute SD look at the disguises Fletch uses during the course of the film, including footage and talk of the makeup that was involved in pulling his characters off.
–Favorite Fletch Moments – A faily useless collection of scenes from the film deemed to be the funniest; runs about two and a half minutes, in SD.
I was hoping for more from Universal on this Blu-ray given that this is what I would consider a classic comedy, but this is it unfortunately.
With that, let’s get to the summary…