Flashback Corner--Cloak & Dagger

“I want you to infiltrate their seventh level.  And go to their vending machine.  Pick me up a pack of Twinkies.  There’s a secret message inside.”

Most young boys dream of being heroes.  Some like me dreamt of being a James Bond type spy who single-handedly saves the country using all of the knowledge he’s gathered by age ten.  So in 1984 when I saw the film Cloak & Dagger staring the kid from E.T. running around dodging bullets, knives, and three-fingered spies, in my home town no less, I almost didn’t have to dream any longer.

The film opens in a foreign country as we follow the fictional adventures of master spy Jack Flack played by Dabney Coleman.  When we enter the real world, we see Davey Osborne (Henry Thomas) playing his games with his little friend Kim (Christina Nigra) and almost unrecognizable William Forthsythe as Morris.  When Morris sends Davey and Kim on a mission for gaming catalogues and Twinkies, Davey is witness to a murder of an FBI agent by spies.  Naturally no one believes him, including his father who is also played by Dabney Coleman.  Now the killers are after Davey since the FBI agent gave him a Cloak & Dagger video game cartridge with secret spy stuff on it. It turns into a race against time as Davey is pretty much on his own with his imaginary friend Flack to keep the game out of the hands of the bad guys.

The film over all hasn’t aged too well, it all feels a little too unbelievable even for the 80’s, what saves the entire film is the performance by Henry Thomas, his second best after Elliot in E.T.  You believe in him as a boy caught in these circumstances and you by his smarts even at age eleven.  The script was written by Tom Holland the writer /director of the classics Fright Night and Child’s Play.  The silliness creeps in with some of the clunky dialogue and the bad guys talking in exposition like an “Incredibles” villain.  Coleman does have a great line in the film about ‘real’ heroes and they don’t just shoot bad guys, but go to work and put food on the table.  I really liked that moment.  Another stand out was he music by Brian May, no, not The Queen’s Brian May, another one, it was all very distracting.  Some of the ‘march’ themes work in places, but when two people are sitting in a room talking, you don’t need an entire orchestral score going on in the background.

I did get a twinge of nostalgia from my time at the local Kroger store playing the Cloak & Dagger arcade game while my mom shopped.  And as the events unfold in the film, I felt the latter half of it still worked for the most part.  I still wondered a bit what it would be like to live that kind of heroic adventure, but now being older I strive to be the hero that just puts the food on the table.

--Robert L. Castillo