The Plot: Irwin "Fletch" Fletcher (Chase) is a newspaper reporter who is working a story about the L.A. drug trade when a wealthy businessman asks Fletch to kill him.  Fletch starts looking into the businessman's history and discovers there's more to the story than meets the eye.

"One ticket to a better movie, please."

The Flax Take:
Many things from the 1980s don't hold up that well today.  Breakdancing, leg warmers, and synthesizers as the primary instrument in a song come to mind.  Another thing that comes to mind: Chevy Chase as a leading man.  Chase's dry, non-sequitur-laden style of humor works in a supporting role like Caddyshack, but when it comes to a movie like Fletch, well, let's just say that 22 years have made it pretty difficult to understand how anyone ever thought this was funny.

The weirdest thing about Fletch is its tone.  The main mystery plot in Fletch isn't bad at all; it's a bit knotty at times, enough so that the end of the film features a scene in which Chase effectively announces, "In case you didn't follow all that, let me read you this summary of the plot," but overall it does a decent job of intertwining two stories, and it can be reasonably tense.  And then Chase starts riffing and the whole thing goes to hell.  Like Robin Williams on barbiturates, Chase never goes above 2 on the excitement scale but is still all over the place, tossing out one-liners, wearing disguises, and making joke after joke that falls absolutely flat for no other reason than that it doesn't make sense.  For example, here's a gem:

Fletch: Where am I?
Nurse: You're in the records room.
Fletch: The records room? Oh, then I'm fine.
Nurse: Can I get you something?
Fletch: Yeah, do you have the Beatles' White Album? Never mind, just get me a glass of hot fat. And bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia while you're out there.

The first joke is cringe-inducingly tired (ha ha!  "Records" has more than one meaning!), the second is so random it can't even be parsed, and the third is a reference to a Sam Peckinpah film.  So that's one bad pun and two things that don't even appear to be real jokes.  This movie is supposed to be funny?  It doesn't help that Chase's dry delivery makes him seem to be sleepwalking through the entire film.  Comedy and mystery have been successfully combined in the past, but the jokes here (such as they are) aren't sharp enough to do this successfully, and Chase's general lack of charisma sticks a pin in the entire thing.

From the laughably dated synth score (Harold Faltermeyer was brought on late in the project, which perhaps explains why he only seems to have written two tracks that run over and over) to the tiresome array of nonsensical one-liners to the clumsy mixture of "comedy" and drama, it's hard to imagine how Fletch could have failed in more ways.  I still don't get why this is considered a comedy classic; there are plenty of 80s comedies that I enjoy, so it can't just be the two-decade interval, can it?  Maybe it's just a reflection of how popular Chevy Chase was at the time; anything he made turned to gold.  Watching it now, he just seems bored, and considering the material at his disposal, it's hard to blame him.