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Confess, Fletch, review: Jon Hamm sets the wrong tone in this turgid comedy

Jon Hamm, Confess, Fletch - Miramax
Jon Hamm, Confess, Fletch - Miramax

Fletch – full name “Irwin M Fletcher” – is the hero of nine novels by the American thriller writer Gregory Mcdonald, who hit the big-time with two 1980s films (Fletch and Fletch Lives) starring Chevy Chase at the peak of his fame. He’s a roguish hack journalist and ex-Marine who sniffs out all manner of dubious paydays, and mooches around getting mixed up in murders, like Philip Marlowe without the hard-boiled moral code.

Reviving this character after 35 years is a curious kind of sport, but in the better moments of Confess, Fletch, adapted from the second book in Mcdonald’s series, you cheer it along. Played now by Jon Hamm, in a star turn I wanted to relish more than I did, he’s the same old Fletch in most ways: inventing goofy aliases when he needs to go undercover, colossally annoying the police, and attracting heaps of female attention he doesn’t always want.

The film tumbles into its plot when Fletch arrives in Boston to recover some stolen paintings, moves into a rental home, and finds the dead body of a young woman inside. Lackadaisically alerting the authorities, and baffling an inspector called Monroe (Roy Wood, Jr), he’s their prime suspect, but couldn’t care less; it’s not the type of role for which Hamm is prepared to break into a sweat.

He has his moments. One unctuous guise as a lifestyle journalist yields a good scene with Lucy Punch, as the pretentious ex-wife of the dodgy drug addict who owns his digs. Too many other situations drag or misfire, waiting for laughs that don’t land.

As the hippie disaster area next door, Annie Mumolo is more stressful to watch than funny. The never-unwelcome Kyle MacLachlan needed better dialogue, as a smoothie art dealer whose main personality traits are being a pathological germophobe, loving EDM, and owning a boat. Marcia Gay Harden lifts things a touch with her flirty-diva turn as an Italian Countess, conjuring shades of Dianne Wiest from Bullets over Broadway.

Greg Mottola can direct with more flair, as he proved with Adventureland; the film slumps into a pedestrian rhythm while supplying excuses for itself. Something about Hamm’s cranky stoicism also sets the wrong tone – I craved the more elastic charm of Bill Hader or Paul Rudd, who’d have made Fletch more of a genial operator, and given the film more bounce. Visually, it’s one great shrug, but to get by with a throwaway murder plot this routine, the zingers at least must zing. They rarely do. There’s something turgid and defeated about it.


12A cert, 98min. In cinemas from Friday