Fletch Lives ironically kills the franchise stone dead.
If Fletch Lives didn’t exist, it would be hard to imagine anyone clamouring for a sequel to Fletch that saw Chevy Chase’s wisecracking investigative journalist swap the bustling streets of LA for a trip to the Deep South. And yet, in 1989, that’s exactly what arrived. Fletch Lives takes a character who worked best as a sharp-witted, fast-talking satirist of urban corruption and drops him into a caricature of Southern gothic, where the jokes are broad, the satire is blunted, and the cultural stereotypes are excruciatingly outdated.
The film finds Irwin M. “Fletch” Fletcher inheriting a Louisiana plantation, which he soon discovers is tangled in a web of shady business dealings, evangelical corruption, and racial insensitivity so thick that even at the time, some of its choices felt tone-deaf. Where the original film balanced its snarky irreverence with a genuinely intriguing mystery, Fletch Lives seems to have no interest in being anything more than a vehicle for Chase’s increasingly tired disguises and hit-or-miss quips.
The comedy struggles with a desperate, grasping quality, as if the film is constantly trying to convince the audience that it’s still as sharp and relevant as its predecessor. But the shift in setting does Fletch Lives no favours. While the first film was anchored in the seedy, cynical world of LA’s elite, this sequel trades the urbane smarts for fish-out-of-water antics that often boil down to lazy Southern stereotypes. Corrupt televangelists, bumbling rednecks, and cartoonish Ku Klux Klan members populate the film, but none of them offer anything fresh or insightful. Worse, the film leans into racial humour in ways that were uncomfortable in 1989 and are outright indefensible now.
Chase, for his part, seems to be going through the motions, coasting on his smarmy charm but offering none of the comedic precision that made Fletch such a cult classic. The disguises – always a highlight of the original – feel forced, and the one-liners are often more grating than clever. There’s an air of self-satisfaction to the performance that suggests Chase himself wasn’t particularly invested. The supporting cast, including Hal Holbrook as a genteel Southern lawyer and R. Lee Ermey as a fire-and-brimstone preacher, do their best, but they’re stranded in a script that confuses absurdity with humour.
Beyond the obvious problem of its racial insensitivity, Fletch Lives just isn’t particularly funny. The jokes are lazy, the mystery is paper-thin, and the film lacks any of the energy or pacing that made the original so enjoyable. Instead of being a worthy follow-up, it feels like a parody of itself, doubling down on all the wrong elements.
While Fletch endures as a relic of its time, held aloft by Chase’s peak-era charisma and a genuinely engaging plot, Fletch Lives is an artefact of Hollywood’s worst sequel impulses: an uninspired cash grab that misunderstood what made its predecessor work. It’s aged terribly, not just because of its uncomfortable racial undertones, but because its comedy is so profoundly misjudged. If Fletch was a sharp-witted satirist, Fletch Lives is his hacky cousin doing a bad stand-up routine in a second-rate comedy club. Some movies deserve sequels, but nobody deserved this.
