“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
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