Jonathan plays a game called Gotcha in which he hunts and is hunted by other students with paint guns. After a big win, he goes off for a vacation in France where he meets the sexy Sasha who says she is only interested in him because he is a virgin. She takes him with her to East Germany where they are separated and he has to escape back to the west on his own, all the while being trailed by East German spies. He arrives home only to find the game is still going on, and a canister of film is in his backpack. Then Sasha re-appears. Gotcha! When you're a child of the 80's like I was you tend to see movies in your adolescents that you don't understand until you become older. I would say this is true for any decade you live in, and the media in which we experience these stories is not exclusive to just film. I watched "Gotcha" when I was seven. I didn't get all the jokes, but I liked the action. The title and the imagines of the film stayed with me until this very day.<br/><br/>Yesterday, I watch "Gotcha!" again on Television. I knew it starred Anthony Edwards from 'Revenge of The Nerd" fame and later the hospital drama "ER". It also starred a very cute looking Linda Fiorentino(of course she always looks cute), sporting a short hair cut. The film is basically a James Bond as if written by a UCLA student. It's about a college pupil who gets caught up in Cold War espionage. You would think that by that description is would be like the terrible film like "If Looks Could Kill", starring the Richard Grieco-which by the way he served fries last week, and that was the best performance he has done in a long time. The truth is "Gotcha!" is not that dreadful. actually its kind of funny.<br/><br/>It turns out the college kid played by Anthony Edwards, who's name is Jonathan Moore in the film, likes to play a campus spy game with other students called "Gotcha!". The game is pretty simple; you have a paint gun, you follow your target around the University and you shot them. Jonathan is called by his best friend Manolo "a regular James Bond", then Jonathan say back "Yeah but James Bond had Octopussy, I can't even get a date." Later on in the film is romantic problems go from bad, to good, to great, then just down right terrible.<br/><br/>Manolo and Jonathan go to France during their break from school. The scene in which Jonathan asked his parents for money to go to Europe is amusing and but it could have been written better. In the city of love, Jonathan meets the Linda Fiorentino character called Sasha; she is not who she appears to be. I liked the love story between Jonathan & Sasha; there could have been a whole movie their by itself, a movie I would actually like to watch. She teaches him the art of lovemaking and Europe, while he teaches her about America. A few days after they meet and fall in love, she tells him she has to go to Berlin where she has to pick up a package. She asked Jonathan to go with her. It is about this time that he gets suspicious, but does not believe yet that she is involved in espionage or that they are in danger. He goes with her. After a day or two in Berlin, she asked him to go to East Berlin, and a series in a series of spy like chases and amusing jokes follow after that.<br/><br/>Even though there is many minor jokes in the film, there is one major joke that I thought was down right hilarious. It brought it from a two and a half star movie up to a three. After having a really bad time in East Berlin, Jonathan was told to leave that side of the country if she give him a certain message; she does. He leaves the checkpoint, walks over to a military officer on the West Berlin side and asked if he is in the American zone. The man says yes. Jonathan turns towards East Berlin, give the finger, and says "F*** You!" When he walks way, the military officer say "I've been wanting to do that for six months." This is a good movie to watch on Television, but I would not pay good, hard earned money to rent it. For what it was I thought it was fun. Anthony Edwards must have either had a really great agent or been really good on auditions to have simply survived, let alone thrived as an actor after this plodding, superficial and stereotypical 80s movie.<br/><br/>Jonathan Moore (Anthony Edwards) is a college student who is absolutely great at a game called Gotcha! He and a bunch of other players hunt each other around campus and shoot each other with paintball guns. After the audience gets a display of Jonathan's skill, he and his friend and roommate Manolo (Jsu Garcia) are off to Europe for Spring Break. While in France, with their collars turns up as required by the federal Bad Cinema Fashion Act of 1980, Jonathan meets a mysterious woman named Sasha (Linda Fiorentino) and ditches his friend to go with her to Berlin. It turns out Sasha is a courier trying to sneak some film out of East Berlin. She ends up hiding the film in Jonathan's back pack and he ends up running for his life from the KGB.<br/><br/>Now, you'd think that this point in the story is where Jonathan's skills as a paintball warrior would come into play and he'd use the talents at hunting and hiding he displayed in the first 5 minutes of the movie to win a cat-and-mouse game with the KGB agents. You'd think that but you'd be wrong. Instead we get this incredibly ponderous and shallow series of scenes where Jonathan behaves more like a kid bumming his way across Europe on 5 dollars a day than someone caught up in international espionage.<br/><br/>Eventually Jonathan makes it back home, where he puts on a pair of sunglasses for no reason as also mandated by the federal Bad Cinema Fashion Act of 1980 and the film stops even trying to make sense. The KGB follows him back to America but Jonathan doesn't trust the CIA so he enlists the help of an LA street gang and ugh. It's just all so stupid.<br/><br/>Anthony Edwards turns in a nondescript performance as one of those 80s movie rebels who are really about as unconventional and provocative as Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties. Linda Fiorentino rolls out an Czechoslovakian accent that makes her sound like Natasha from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. The film's soundtrack lets you hear about 10 seconds of "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood and then buries you under a landslide of the worst 80s synthesizer rock you'll ever hear. Most of the characters in this film seem to have come straight out of the best selling book "How to Write a Bad Sitcom".<br/><br/>Basically, Gotcha! was produced when someone entered the words "paintball" and "spy" into the same bad movie generator that belched out dozens of other generically unfunny and unentertaining films during the Reagan era. If you want to see Edwards with a luxurious mane of hair or get a glimpse of Fiorentino's boobs, you can find it her. Otherwise, just go rent Teen Wolf again or something. Gotcha is about as devoid of personality as it's possible for a narrative movie to be.
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338 weeks ago