After definitively playing male lead Don Draper in the landmark cable TV series “Mad Men” from 2007 to 2015, the charismatic Jon Hamm lost his way. He played himself in episodes of both “Barry” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” But his other work did not stick. For a time, he was best known as the pitchman voice of Mercedes Benz (“the best or nothing”). Who would have guessed that the best post-Draper role Hamm would play would be Gregory Mcdonald’s popular, wise-cracking sleuth Irwin Maurice Fletcher, better known as Fletch, previously played on the screen by Chevy Chase?
“Confess, Fletch” is the second in the series of novels by Mcdonald. The film begins with Fletch arriving from Rome — where he enjoyed a whirlwind romance with an Italian heiress named Angela (charming Chilean actor of Italian descent Lorenza Izzo) — at a triple-decker in Boston’s South End (the film was shot in Boston) and finding a dead body.
The plot, which is complicated, involves nine stolen masterpieces, including a Picasso (Boston? Stolen paintings? Really?). Angela, whose rich father was supposedly kidnapped, believes that the paintings were stolen by her former stepmother, the Countess de Grassi (a delightful turn by Academy award winner Marcia Gay Harden), and sent to a germophobic art dealer in the Back Bay named Horan (an amusing Kyle MacLachlan). The film reunites Hamm with John Slattery, his partner in crime on “Mad Men.” Slattery plays former investigative reporter Fletch’s foul-mouthed former editor, who now works for a Boston newspaper known as the Sentinel.
