Flashback Corner--Gotcha!

“Our side, their side.  I don’t know about that shit.  But I got a friend who’s in trouble, and I’m on his side…Who’s side are you on?”

 

          Three years before Bruce Willis became the ordinary man in an extraordinary situation.  Before every movie after was “Die Hard” on a plane, or on a train, or on a boat or in the rain.  Before John McClane, there was Jonathon Moore, and it was “Die Hard” on a college campus in 1985’s “Gotcha!”

Actually “Gotcha!” was more of a young man’s James Bond fantasy, seeing how that was the most popular spy at the time.  Anthony Edwards (Revenge of the Nerds, E.R.) is an 18 year old bright yet inexperienced with the ladies typical 80’s college student.  He plays a campus game called Gotcha where he and others hunt each other between classes with paintball guns.  Something that sadly, will never happen on any school grounds again, ever.   While on a trip to Europe with his friend Manolo (Jsu Garcia) he meets a sexy Czechoslovakian named Sasha (Linda Fiorentino) who seduces him into going with her to West Germany where he gets pulled into the world of secret microfilms, thugs with guns and spies with strudel.

The script is as cheesy as the bad Bond films, the acting is not much better, but you can feel that the filmmakers enjoy the material enough to go through the motions and try to make a good film.  Released the same year as an actual James Bond movie “A View to a Kill” starring Roger Moore, “Gothcha!” is less of a slog to sit through.  It’s entertaining for what it is and after almost thirty years it’s aged pretty well.  Edwards moment after leaving West Germany still made me laugh out loud.  There are decent on-liners and funny fish-out-of-water moments that still work today.

Aside from director Jeff Kanew’s best film “Revenge of the Nerds” also starring Edwards this is probably his second best effort.  The writers of the film included Dan Gordon who would go on to write “Murder in the First”, “The Hurricane” and had Wesley Snipes utter the classic line “Always bet on black” in “Passenger 57”.  If you’ve never seen this one or not seen it since the 80’s, check it out again, you may find yourself singing along with the catchy theme song.

--Robert L. Castillo