Confess, Fletch

Jon Hamm will be taking over the role of Irwin "Fletch" Fletcher in a new reboot of the franchise based on the Gregory McDonald novel series. Chevy Chase brought the character to life in 1985's Fletch and 1989's Fletch Lives.

Hamm will play the role in "Confess, Fletch", based on the 2nd novel of the series. Greg Mottola is directing with Zev Borow having written the script. Shooting may begin next spring according to Hamm.

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There have been so very many stops and starts with rebooting Fletch over the past twenty years that I will believe it when I see it.

Overall I think Hamm is a decent choice. Jason Lee and then Ben Affleck were attached when Kevin Smith was trying to direct it for many years, Zach Braff was gonna be Fletch with Bill Lawrence at the helm, and most recently it was supposed to be Jason Sudeikis directed by Steve Pink. The original movie is so damn good almost in spite of Chevy Chase. It is his best role in many ways, but they infused it with maybe a touch too much mid-'80s wackiness. It succeeds so well despite these tonal shifts because at its core they adapted the novel pretty damn well and it played to Chevy's strengths. With Fletch Lives, for some eternally dumb reason, they did not adapt another one of the novels. Despite the same director being at the helm (a director I like) there was no strong story to fall back on. Just empty Chevy schtick. It killed what could have been a true franchise for him had they kept going back to the source material.

I like Mottola's Adventureland and Day Trippers a lot. Superbad is definitely fun as is Larry David's Clear History, but Paul was slightly disappointing given the cast and premise and Keeping Up with the Joneses was a true dud.

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Agree re: Hamm. Good choice, I think. Sudeikis seems like he would've done a good job, too.

I can see the Braff/Lawrence thing working, though more just in the "I'd really like to see that even if it's not Fletch" sense, since I love Lawrence.

Lawrence was also responsible for the short-lived Rush Hour TV series and as much as I knew people were not going to see it, I managed to catch the whole series and it was actually one of those series where each episode got better and better and for a TV reboot, Jon Foo and Justin Hires actually were good as the small screen Lee and Carter.

I am interested to see Hamm as Fletch. Hopefully, it will happen.

That's good to know. I think I saw he was involved but when I read it was kinda meh I just assumed it was in some kind of abstract producer role. If Lawrence is involved to any meaningful degree it's basically a sure thing that it'll be at least pretty good, though.

I heard Hamm was in Boston filming something, didn't realize it was this.

At long last, a trailer...

This was the most aggressively unfunny film I have seen in years. Hollywood writers have lost the plot. It's like they've all been replaced by teenage aliens from planet "Woke" who have never actually seen real human interactions. It's as if they tried to reverse engineer "funny" from watching some old movies and had DallE-2 fill in the blanks (my apologies to DallE-2 as it probably would have made a better film). The oldsters that this film was made for, however, don't get away Scott free. Fletch has his white privilege checked and Fletch gives a great boon to two random Graffiti artists of color.

Note to Hollywood - Jon Hamm is NOT Chevy Chase. Jon Hamm does depressed well. He's good at "smug." He's good at angry. He's not good at being goofy, wacky, or lovable. Bugs Bunny he ain't. This film was DOA the moment he was cast. And I say this as someone who really enjoyed Madmen.

More can and will be said, but is any of it worth saying. Save your time. Save you money. Watch something else.