This one is sort of an unintended guilty pleasure for me. Unlike some of my other picks, I hadn’t seen this movie since the mid-80s. I was checking through the older movies at my local video store and happened to see it sitting there. “I haven’t seen this in aaaaaaages!” so I snagged it. I’m really glad I did! For despite the high cheese quotient and ridiculously outdated tech, it was still a fun film. And it’s full of “OMG, that’s so-and-so!” casting, some of which you won’t recognize unless you look up the movie on IMDB.
One of the people you’ll recognize right away, aside from Henry Thomas (Elliott from ET), is Dabney Coleman. I’ve always had a soft spot for him, though I couldn’t tell you why. He usually plays grumps or slightly bad guys who aren’t really bad, so I can’t tell you the appeal, but it’s there. And he’s in the movie twice, as secret agent Jack Flack, a very vivid figment of Davey’s imagination, and also as Davey’s father.
Davey and his friend Kim like to play secret agents and communicate in code via ludicrously large walkie-talkies (I actually had a pair almost exactly like them as a kid!) and like to hang out at a computer game store where the state-of-the-art Atari 5200 is proudly on display. Yeah, I had one of those too, but I never had the Cloak & Dagger game. Probably for the best.
One day, Davey sees a man murdered right in front of him. Before dying, the man gives him a Cloak & Dagger cartridge. Unfortunately, the killers see Davey and learn his name because Davey carelessly dropped his softball with his full name written on it. Silly boy! This means the killers can find him, but not before he takes the cartridge to his techie friend at the game store who determines that there’s an extra chip which must have some sort of hidden code or secret plans on it!
The bulk of the movie is spent with the killers chasing Davey around San Antonio (with obligatory stops at the Alamo and the River Walk) with huge automatic weapons and practically no interference from any law enforcement agency. Luckily, Davey has ace secret agent Jack Flack on his side.
The thing that makes it such a cheesy movie though, even when you take out the heavily armed people running around downtown San Antonio, is when you realize that Jack Flack is Davey’s imaginary friend. Then it becomes a movie about this preternaturally clever 12-year-old who has all these secret agent skills and tricks learned from playing an RPG. I bet if Tom Hanks’ character in Mazes & Monsters had actually stopped foreign agents from stealing secret government plans instead of wanting to jump off the Sears Tower, there would have been a lot less D&D panic in the mid-80s. When you realize Davey is Jack Flack, it makes the kid in Home Alone look kinda lame in comparison.
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WereGeek
WereGeek is reading 5-7 books at any given time, none of them very fast. These can range from alternative universe fiction to historical non-fiction and from theoretical physics to Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader. You can argue with her all you want, but Dirk Benedict will always be her Starbuck. Her ringtone is the theme from Airwolf and she believes that there's nothing that can't be improved by the judicious application of werewolves. Or bacon. Or werewolves with bacon. She can be contacted at werewolf17 @ gmail.com and followed on Twitter @weregeek.
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