Fletch (film) - Reception

Reception

Fletch was released on May 31, 1985, in 1,225 theaters, grossing $7 million on its opening weekend. It went on to make $50.6 million in North America and $9 million in the rest of the world for a worldwide total of $59.6 million. The film performed well on home video, earning $24.4 million in rentals.

Fletch received generally positive reviews and has a 75 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Film critic Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "The problem is, Chase's performance tends to reduce all the scenes to the same level, at least as far as he is concerned. He projects such an inflexible mask of cool detachment, of ironic running commentary, that we're prevented from identifying with him . . . Fletch needed an actor more interested in playing the character than in playing himself". Vincent Canby in his review for The New York Times praised Chase's performance, writing, "He manages simultaneously to act the material with a good deal of nonchalance and to float above it, as if he wanted us to know that he knows that the whole enterprise is somewhat less than transcendental". Time magazine's Richard Schickel wrote, "In Fletch, the quick, smartly paced, gags somehow read as signs of vulnerability. Incidentally, they add greatly to the movie's suspense. Every minute you expect the hero's loose lip to be turned into a fat one". In his review for the Chicago Reader, Dave Kehr wrote, "Chase and Ritchie make a strong, natural combination: the union of their two flip, sarcastic personalities produces a fairly definitive example of the comic style of the 80s, grounded in detachment, underreaction, and cool contempt for rhetorically overblown authority figures".