99 min | R | September 16, 2022 | Miramax
Jon Hamm plays Fletch, a wiseass ex-reporter who flies to Boston, finds a dead woman in his rented townhouse, and becomes the prime suspect. He spends the rest of the movie needling cops and stealing art instead of acting innocent. The mystery is an excuse. The deadpan is the point.
Irwin “Fletch” Fletcher arrives in Boston to recover a stolen art collection and walks into a corpse on the living room floor. The police like him for the murder. He likes the case as a chance to wisecrack his way through every interrogation. Greg Mottola builds the film around a man who treats a homicide investigation as a low-stakes inconvenience. The murder is the engine. The real subject is a guy who refuses to take anything seriously, and the comedy comes from watching the world fail to rattle him.
Jon Hamm plays Fletch with a loose, unhurried confidence that turns every scene into a verbal fencing match. He delivers insults with the calm of a man who knows he is the smartest person in the room and finds that boring. Roy Wood Jr. plays Inspector Morris Monroe as the exhausted straight man, and the two trade lines like opponents who secretly enjoy the game. Kyle MacLachlan plays art dealer Ronald Horan with a clipped precision that curdles into menace. Marcia Gay Harden plays the Countess with a vampish accent and predatory timing that nearly walks off with her scenes.
Mottola and co-writer Zev Borow keep the staging plain and let the dialogue carry the weight. The cinematography favors warm, flat daylight and unfussy two-shots that put the actors face to face and refuse to telegraph the jokes. The editing holds on reactions a beat longer than a conventional comedy would, which lets Hamm land his lines through stillness instead of cutaways. The mystery plot moves with no urgency, and that relaxation is a deliberate choice. The film wants the rhythm of a hangout, not a thriller.
The result is a comedy that succeeds entirely on tone and casting. The whodunit is thin and the stakes never tighten, but the picture knows it and leans into the looseness. Hamm finds a register that lets his charm do the work without strain. This is a minor pleasure built from major control, and it earns its laughs by getting out of its own way.