Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 12 December

Confess, Fletch (Mottola, 2022)

Of all the mod­ern act­ors who have become inex­tric­ably linked to their best-known char­ac­ters, Jon Hamm is the most. Inextricably linked, that is.

Seven sea­sons on Mad Men has him liv­ing rent free in my mind as Don Draper, to the extent that whenev­er I see him on screen, I think “That’s Don Draper play­ing a dif­fer­ent role.”

I think this is a lack of ima­gin­a­tion on my part rather than a lack of tal­ent on his, but no oth­er act­or fails to tran­scend his estab­lished per­sona more than Hamm.

Until now.

The char­ac­ter of Irwin Maurice “Fletch” Fletcher was cre­ated by Gregory MacDonald and appeared in sev­er­al nov­els from 1974 to 1994, arriv­ing as a big screen char­ac­ter in two very loosely adap­ted movies star­ring Chevy Chase.

Since Fletch Lives in 1989, sev­er­al attempts were made to bring the char­ac­ter back but noth­ing suc­ceeded until Hamm and writer-director Greg Mottola (Adventureland, Superbad) got involved in 2020. The res­ult is Confess, Fletch, a film that review­ers like to call “an ami­able romp”.

Fletch is a wise­crack­ing former invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ist with an exag­ger­ated belief in his own abil­it­ies and a tend­ency to get embroiled in oth­er people’s trouble. In Confess, Fletch, that is dis­cov­er­ing a murder at his Boston AirBnB while he is try­ing to track down mil­lions of dol­lars worth of art stolen from the fath­er of his new Italian girl­friend (Lorenza Izzo).

Fletch is instantly a sus­pect in the killing so he goes about try­ing to prove his inno­cence as well as some­how con­nect­ing the murder to the miss­ing paintings.

The slow-moving cops on the case are won­der­fully writ­ten and nicely played by Roy Wood Jr. and Ayden Mayeri – char­ac­ter work is a real strength of this film – and Hamm’s Mad Men co-star John Slattery makes a fun appear­ance as a dishevelled news­pa­per edit­or. Special note for Annie Mumulo who pulls out all the stops as a hil­ari­ously dis­trac­ted neighbour.

Confess, Fletch got great reviews last year but didn’t man­age a cinema release in New Zealand so I’ve been look­ing for­ward to it show­ing up in some capa­city. It did not let me down – there were plenty of laughs and a decent plot with a few gentle twists.

As pro­du­cer, Hamm is clearly look­ing for a fran­chise he can have to him­self but the botched Covid-impacted release last year seems to have dealt a blow to that plan. 

This is a shame as I would hap­pily see lots of films with Hamm as Fletch, and I look for­ward to the day when I think of him as this super-relaxed, witty and charm­ing rogue before I am even­tu­ally reminded of anti-hero Don Draper once again.

Where to find Confess, Fletch

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Streaming on Netflix or digit­al rental

Australia: Streaming on Binge and Paramount+ or digit­al rental

USA: Streaming on Fubo, Paramount+, Showtime and DirectTV or digit­al purchase

UK: Streaming on Paramount+ and SkyNow or digit­al rental

Further reading

Regular read­ers will know that I still have a great love for phys­ic­al media and I wrote about that love and the cur­rent state of DVD, Blu-ray and UHD in Aotearoa for RNZ. Short ver­sion? It’s dire but I will con­tin­ue to fight the good fight..