Cloak and Dagger (1984).

Henry Thomas will always be synonymous with Steven Spielberg's E.T.  He may have managed to find success in a host of other films, and even other genres (the most notable of which remains his work for none other than Martin Scorsese), yet the memory of pop culture often turns out to be a fickle and cruel tyrant.  There used to be a saying in Hollywood that you're only as good as your next picture.  However the passage of time seems to have proved that a more accurate maxim goes something like, "If you ever manage to make something great, then nothing else you do will ever matter".  Spielberg is sort of lucky in that regard.  The story of a lost alien child remains one of his most iconic and beloved pictures, yet it's clear he's just as well known for movies like Jaws and the Indiana Jones films, or his collaborations with Don Bluth, just as much as that archetypal image of a bicycle flying across the face of the moon.  It could be argued that even the fact that a former critical flop like Hook is starting to have its reputation re-evaluated in a positive way is a testament to the director's ability to not be limited just to any one singular bit of accomplishment.  That's got to be a sign of the best sort of talent an artist can ask for, in the grand scheme of things.  The fact remains, however, that while the filmmaker who directed him continued to flourish and thrive, Spielberg's former main child star from 1982 is still just Elliott so far as most viewers are concerned.  

Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if most of us don't even recognize him from any of his adult performances.  And I'm willing to be you anything that nobody recalls that he was ever in a kid's action adventure thriller involving spies.  It was the very next thing he did right after that trip across the Moon.  Cloak and Dagger is an interesting sort of film, in that it's one of those few times when a studio decides to update one of its old properties for whichever audience is currently packing theaters.  Back in the 1980s, with Spielberg's Sci-Fi family epic causing its own little juggernaut in pop culture, it meant creating a studio system eager to capitalize on that picture's success.  One of the most obvious ways to do that was to try and see if you could still bank on the star power of E.T's lead actor.  This seems to have been the sole motivating factor in getting Cloak off the ground.  The studios sniffed a potential goldmine waiting to be exploited for however long Spielberg's juggernaut lasted in the popular consciousness, and so they remade an old film for the specific purpose of having Thomas star in it.  The final result was the film under the microscope today.  And the real question is just how well it holds up under its own merits.

The Story.

If you were to ask 11 year old David Osborne (Thomas) how he's doing, he'd most likely tell you everything's "Jake", so far as he's concerned, anyway.  The trouble is it's difficult to tell if he really means it or not.  On the surface that might be true, up to a point.  It's when you look past appearances that things get sort of complicated.  At first glance, Davey's just this normal, average Lone Star Kid, with a nice house and life right in the middle of the literal Alamo territory, and with not much in the way to complain about.  It isn't until you get to know the difficulties in his personal life that the cracks in the facade start to show.  For one thing, his dad, Hal (Dabney Coleman), kinda tends to act like he's married more to his job as an Air Traffic Controller at a nearby army base, rather than that of his family.  The real gut punch comes when you realize a lot of that has to do with the fact that Hal lost his wife not too long ago, meaning Davey no longer has a mother.  Neither of them talks about it much, yet it goes a long way toward explaining why both remaining members of the Osborne family tends to sequester themselves away in their own, personal hobbies.  For Hal, it's being paid to get his head literally lost in the clouds.  His boy is pretty much the same way, except in his case, the meaning is a lot more normal and figurative.  Davey's been getting into a lot into video games most of the time, now.  

He's started hanging out with Kim Gardener (Christina Nigra), one of his neighbors, and they've both gravitated towards the toy section of their local mall that specializes in the latest game releases.  They seem to have gotten chummy with Morris (Bill Forsythe).  He's the clerk they've got in charge of test running the latest video games in a backroom of the store.  Kim and Davey seem to have gotten into the good graces of the sort of guy who otherwise qualifies as someone who still probably lives in his parent's basement even in his 30s.  Whatever the case, it's Morris who lets the kids in on which new games are the hottest ones on the market.  At the moment, the one to hold the top spot seems to be an espionage styled RPG platformer called Cloak and Dagger.  The way it works is you play as this character known only as Jack Flack, international super spy.  The game's mechanics and plot are as basic as they come.  You send Flack globe-hopping all around the place defeating bad guys.  To an adult, it's pretty clear that all we're dealing with is the most recent James Bond knock-off, with maybe a bit of Carmen Sandiego thrown in for good measure.  To someone of Davey's age, however, it's the height of entertainment.  There are even times when it seems to be more than just that.  Sometimes, it's as if ol' Jack seems like more than a character in a video game, just another dime store Mario clone.

For Davey, Jack's become the sort of person he feels he can turn to when it seems like all the adults in his life have abandoned him.  At least that's how it seems, sometimes.  This worries his dad, and Hal takes the time to remind his son that there's a whole world of difference between the real world, and what amounts to no more than a bunch of pixels on a television screen.  So of course life decides to throw dad's lesson a curveball.  The way it works is while Dave and Kim are just chilling with Morris at the mall, he sends them both out to get refreshments.  It's as Davey's performing this ordinary chore that a man bursts into the same hallway that the snack machine is located.  The man's chest is full of gunshot wounds, and he's bleeding out fast.  Before he dies, the mysterious stranger passes on a copy of Cloak and Dagger to the now very frightened little boy.  The stranger tells Davey to keep the contents of that game safe before he dies.  David runs to tell the police, yet when they all arrive back at the crime scene, the body is gone, and the adults now think that Davey is the Boy Who Cried Wolf.  They don't even bother to look at the video game cartridge he's kept as proof.  The ironic part is this means he's allowed to go home with it, and when he puts the cartridge into his home game console, all that shows up are a series of numbers, patterns, and diagrams.  It all looks like some sort of top secret schematic.

The next thing Davey knows, he's answering a phone call where the person on the other line tells him that they've kidnapped his friend, Kim.  They'll do things to her unless Dave hands over that Cloak and Dagger cartridge.  So now the Boy Who Cried Wolf is forced to go on the run.  That's how Davey finds himself hiding in crowds, looking out for who he can trust, and always keeping one eye over his shoulder.  To make matters more confusing, who should show up in the nick of time except none other than Jack Flack himself, in the seeming flesh.  With his guidance, Davey has to see if he's got it in him to rescue his friend, get the authorities to believe him, save his own skin, and see if he has what it takes to be as brave and resourceful as his favorite spy.

Conclusion: An Old Idea with a Lack of Spark. 

There came a point for me somewhere along the runtime where I began to realize this was not going to be a complete and total home run.   The trick is it's difficult to know where.  I'm not sure it's any one thing I can point my finger at.  Or, if it turns out it is one concrete aspect of this picture which telegraphed the whole thing wasn't going to work, then, I guess the reason I struggle to point the finger at the problem is because it's just that difficult to explain.  I spent the first and middle half of this film willing to give it a chance.  There came a point during the start of the third act where I realized things weren't going to work out.  I think what we've got here is an at least interesting setup, followed by a less than stellar payoff.  Here's the best way I can explain it.  The whole film begins on a rather fun note of parody.  We start off not with Elliot Thomas, but rather with Dabney Coleman's spy character, Jack Flack.  In fact, the whole opening scene might almost be described as something you might find in a Mel Brooks picture.  We follow Flack along as he goes about trying to complete a mission where he partakes in a bunch of sight gags that somehow manage to balance out between the comic and a genuine sense of 80s action awesomeness.  The best gag comes from when he tries being polite to a debutant girl, who then tries to kill him.  It ends with Flack doing a respectable laying out of the remains.

Then he gets cornered by a gate slamming shut in front of him and (I'm not making this up) a pair giant dice (yes, really, one yellow, the other red) come tumbling around the corner toward him.  It's like the spy character has somehow got trapped in the Jolly Green Giant's Craps Table.  Either that or a version of Indiana Jones if it was half baked up by a little kid.  That turns out to be the case when Jack finds himself mysteriously lifted up into the air and we're introduced to Elliot Thomas's Davey character hoisting a Flack action figure off of a game board setup.  The truth is then revealed that we've been inside the main character's head as he cooks up a fun action-adventure scenario for his friend Kim, while they're both just chilling out with Morris at the video game store.  It's an interesting way to start a film, because it puts the audience on an immediate off-guard footing.  The viewer is left unsure from that point on over what can or can't be trusted about everything we're about to see.  This does not have to be a poor creative choice, in and of itself.  Gene Wilder once said he wanted to introduce the character of Willy Wonka in such a way as to make the audience aware that from the moment you met him, they could never be sure if he was telling the truth or not.  The rest of the Mel Stuart adaptation stands and remains as a winning proof of concept for such an approach.  It's with this insight in mind that it's easy to claim that this could be a good strategy to apply to a thriller story like this one.

I'll get back to how this could have worked a little later.  Right now, let's focus on how the film plays out.  After we transition from Elliot's Davey's private world of fantasy, we then follow Thomas's character home, and the viewer is shown that there's been a bit of stress there, as it's clear the main lead and his dad both struggle with the prototypical Disney setup of Dead Parent Syndrome.  It's all there as an explanation for why Dave has such an over-active Imagination.  The movie makes it clear this is all his way of coping with a reality that he often finds difficult to deal with.  The entirety of the film's basic premise is therefore prototypical, which means we've got a familiar story template on our hands.  Once again, this type of setup doesn't have to count as a minus, in and of itself.  What matters in a situation like this is less a matter of what premise the filmmakers use, and rather how they choose to be creative or otherwise with it.  For a while, things seem like they might be headed in an interesting direction.

We arrive at the scene where Elliot Davey witnesses a murder, and then has the film's McGuffin passed along to him, triggering the action of the main story proper.  It's a pretty typical Hitchcock scenario with a bit of post-Bond shenanigans thrown in, though all of it is necessarily toned down for a Young Adult demographic.  From here the film starts to follow along with David as he basically has to go wandering through the streets of San Antonio in search of either an authority figure who will believe him, or a safe place to hide.  It even builds up to an interesting mid-way point where the movie's villains (lead in part by Michael Murphy) call him and offer to meet up for a trade.  Dave hands over the video game cartridge, and they'll let him walk away with Kim.  It's perhaps the one moment where all of the film's elements start to come together in a way that feels at least somewhat unique, and maybe even a little clever.  It starts with a scene between Elliot and E.T. Dave and a make-believe version of Flack, as they strategize how to handle the situation.  Jack points out the obvious that there's no way the bad guys are going to allow any witnesses to just walk away after they've learned so much about their scheme, so it's best to to go into the meeting with a fail-proof back-up plan to get them both out alive.  So Davey and Flack both come up with an idea, and it manages to work, no matter how desperate it all is.

One of the things that makes this scene interesting is the presence of the Flack character.  He's introduced at the start as this imaginary friend that Davey turns to whenever he feels lonesome and needs someone to talk to.  Flack shows up in those moments where it's clear Dave thinks the adults won't listen to him, or else he's caught in a jam and is trying to think how the super spy character would handle the situation.  The character of Jack is thus meant to serve as a special friend/mentor figure for the main lead, and if you need three guesses to understand why that's the case, then welcome to planet Earth.  It couldn't be more clear that this is the filmmakers way of capitalizing on what still remains as Thomas's greatest success at the movies.  This is the same dynamics of E.T. if it was made as a spy thriller for kids, rather than an Bradburyesque Urban Sci-Fi Fantasy.  Again, though, while the initial setup is familiar, it is still possible to tell that the filmmakers knew they couldn't just do a half-assed copy and paste job here.  Instead, they let their knowledge of the Spy Genre's tropes work in their favor, thus creating what starts out as an interesting sounding riff on a familiar formula.  Jack and Dave have the same friendship dynamics as E.T. and Elliot, yet the way it plays out is true to a different format.

With the Spielberg film, it's clear to the audience that they're watching a pair kids bond over just how lost they feel in the world around them.  Something similar appears to be going on with Davey, yet having Jack manifest in his mind as an adult creates a mentorship pattern between the two.  This same process existed up to a point in the Spielberg vehicle as well, yet it existed on a more even plain.  You got the sense that while E.T. was teaching Elliot a lot about how to survive in life, the process also kind of worked both ways.  It was always very clear we were watching two kids deal with each other as equals.  Here, since Jack is an adult and a Bond inspired super spy, there's a lot more of the classic mentor/pupil interaction than was the case before.  This is obvious from the kind of advice Jack keeps giving the protagonist as they story moves along.  Every time it looks like Davey is in a tight spot, it's Jack who encourages him to take an increasing series of dangerous risks.  This culminates in a stand off on the San Antonio Boardwalk between Davey and Mike Murphy's villain character.  It's in this moment where the film telegraphs its departure from the regular Spielberg formula by having a clear note of life or death stakes attached to it.  Murphy's character isn't here to just study the protagonist.  He's a gangster ready to pull a full out hit on a freaking child!  While the scene itself is mostly good and suspenseful, it also seems to be the point where the filmmakers sort of lost the plot more than a bit.

The result is that the rest of the film kind of has to suffer for it.  The reason for this is because I get the sense there came a time when it seems as if the film's director Richard Franklin, and the screenwriter Tom Holland just somehow ran out of ideas.  Part of the problem might be that they over-complicated things by taking the entire film up to what should have been the concluding high point, and then leaving themselves with several other plot points to have to clean up.  The trouble with that is you reached a peak moment in the film too soon, so that everything that's left has no choice except to come off as drawn out and seem overall less interesting compared to what's happened before it.  With all do respect, this counts as the last sort of position any dedicated filmmaker wants to place themselves in.  It's a textbook example of writing yourself into a corner with no hope of finding your way out.  I've been told the movie has its fans, yet I'll have to leave it at "Say Sorry" if I'm just not one of them.  In fact, so long as I'm being honest, I think the movie's final act, where Davey has to board a plane to keep the villains from getting away, just feels sort of tacked on to me.  It's the one moment in the film where I can see the script writer and the director both desperately trying to pull the strings in the hopes we'll like it.

The trouble is all I can give you is my immediate reaction, and I wasn't entertained.  Instead, I felt bored, and wanting to keep checking my watch in order to see how much movie was left.  I was stunned the filmmakers even thought they had enough material left over to pad out the runtime.  Put that all together and it amounts to just so much wasted energy on what could have been a much better idea.  The crux of the issue, as I see it, comes down to two decisive factors.  The first is that we're dealing with a film which counts as both a remake, and an adaptation of a literary source.  The second has to do with the introduction of the Jack Flack character, and the filmmaker's inability to resolve just what to do with him.  Let's take these problems in order.  Starting with the fact that it's a remake of a previous effort, which in turn is based on a literary source.  The whole thing starts with a short story by a 1940s writer of Noir Suspense Thrillers named Cornell Woolrich.  

He probably counts as one of those minor names in the field who nonetheless manages to hang on to some piece fame by penning Thrillers of such quality that even if you forget who wrote them, you'll still remember the stories themselves.  In Woolrich's case, perhaps the biggest reason anyone still knows who he is is down to one very simple reason.  He wrote the short story on which Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window is based.  That's a film which is still well regarded today.  With many viewing it as an indictment of social voyeurism, and of the moral conundrum the movie places us in.  Hitchcock and Woolrich seem to both be asking their shared audience a very troubling question.  What do you suppose it means when socially unacceptable behavior is sometimes the very thing that helps to solve a murder?  I think one of the reasons we can't quite manage to forget a film like this is because Rear Window still hits at a series of phobic pressure points.  Those points are, in turn, all centered around a lot of moral concerns bound up with ideas of safety versus the right to privacy.  The fact that we're still struggling with those issues right up to the moment of this writing says a lot about how the staying power of all the best films is related to the way they are able to speak to us on a some kind of timeless level.  

It's a talent the Hitchcock/Woolrich film has in spades, and the fact it sounds more interesting to talk about than the Henry Thomas film should be a clue to the gap in quality we're dealing with here.  The way Cloak and Dagger ties into all of this has to do with its connection to another Woolrich short story, "The Boy Who Cried Murder".  It's best described as an example of the author taking the same predicament of Window, and then applying it to a juvenile audience.  In each story the setup is the same.  A somewhat alienated loner protagonist manages to see a murder take place, and then has to spend the rest of the narrative convincing others that he isn't seeing things.  In Window, Woolrich's approach to the idea is subtle, whereas in "Boy" its more overt.  The child protagonist doesn't have to play Sherlock Holmes by piecing together subtle clues from life in the house next door.  All he needs to do is be in the wrong place at the wrong time in order to witness a random act of adult cruelty.  In this sense, "The Boy Who Cried Murder" could stand as an open indictment of the contents of the Window story.  In which case, it's possible to claim that here we have the author turning his own satirical lens against himself, as an open act of artistic self-condemnation.  It's all fascinating stuff to think about, and this is a story that deserves its own article.  Right now, however, we're dealing with this film.

What we've got with the Thomas vehicle is best described as a textbook case of the filmmakers watering down their source material.  While someone like Hitchcock could take Woolrich's words and amplify them to a grueling and winning state of heightened paranoia that keeps us glued to our seats, Holland an Franklin somehow find themselves hampered with a story that might've been able to work in a similar vein.  Yet for the life of me, I can't say I know why that is.  It could be because the filmmakers are uncomfortable having to work with what is ostensibly children's fiction, yet that seems a lot more uncertain.  I think the most immediate problem came from them realizing they needed to differentiate their remake from the two previous adaptations that came before, and so the solution they cooked up was to tie Woolrich's initial idea to the world of James Bond.  Or at least this is the best guess I'm able to arrive at in terms of explaining the underlying logic of this film.  To be fair, it is just possible to see how this could make sense on paper.  Woolrich is one of Hitchcock's most famous collaborators, and the Master of Suspense has worked on stories involving international espionage before.  His two most famous efforts in this genre being The Man Who Knew Too Much. and North By Northwest.  In fact, at least one group of film critics as described Northwest as the first, unofficial James Bond movie.

Since it's possible to drawn such lines of influence and inference between diverse efforts of genuine talent, it's not too out of bounds for Holland and Franklin to try and see if they can combine the best of both worlds in order to try and let their remake have a voice and identity of its own.  With all this in mind, I am forced to admit that with genuine talent at the helm, then someone might have been able to pull off this idea.  The trouble is Franklin and Holland prove between the two of them that they're not up to the task.  What happened in the end is that somehow the material got away from them, and they never knew how to get it back.  A lot of the trouble seems to come from how they handle the Jack Flack character.  In some ways, he's the most interesting element of the plot.  On the one hand, he counts as a newcomer to the history of this particular narrative, even while it's easy to see where he's come from. He's nowhere to be found in Woolrich's original source material, or any of its previous adaptations.  Cloak and Dagger marks the first time such a character as this ever appears in a retelling.  At the same time, it's still easy to tell why he wasn't so much created for this version of the tale, as brought along, or imported from one film to another.  The ultimate reason Jack plays any part in this story is simple.

Henry Thomas helped create a pop culture juggernaut by starring in Spielberg's E.T., and Franklin and Holland are busy doing whatever they can to try and ride on that film's coattails.  It's the same strategy that James Bond producer Albert Broccoli followed when Disney made a killing at the box-office with Mary Poppins, hence the botched attempt of copying that success with Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang.  It's no more than Hollywood being true to the formula of chasing after the success of others in all the wrong ways.  The Bond Producers did it back in the 60s, and Franklin and Holland made the same mistake at the height of Spielberg's heyday.  The result is the introduction of a character into the proceedings who functions as an ironic paradox.  He's a new element to cast and story, yet once you figure out exactly who you're looking at, there's no way the observant viewer can call him original.  Instead, the obvious conclusion remains just that.  The filmmakers have taken the character of E.T., stripped away the Extra-terrestrial aspect, retrofitted him out as a human secret agent, and then proceed to make him perform a variation of the same function he had in the Spielberg picture.  Just like with Elliot's friend from the stars, Jack represents a figure of escapism and opportunity for Thomas's Davey.  The protagonist tends to see Flack as the one person who he can talk to on a level of shared understanding.  Jack is meant to be the one friend in the room who get's where David is coming from when the adults can't or won't.

Now, to be fair, while this isn't the most original idea out there, perhaps that's still no reason to say it couldn't succeed, so long as the filmmakers find the right way to handle an idea like this.  To give a concrete illustration of what I mean, if you go back and watch another Spielberg related project, it soon hits you that An American Tail is really just E.T. told from the Extra-terrestrial's point of view, except there he's been transformed into an anthropomorphic Aesopian style mouse.  The Exiled Traveler figure still counts as an alien visitor, just in a more down to Earth sense of the term.  There are many reasons why that film is regarded as a classic, yet one of the most overlooked could very well be because Spielberg and Don Bluth found a way to take the basic premise of E.T. and expand upon it in ways that heightened not only its audience appeal, but also its thematic applicability.  Cloak and Dagger doesn't have such high and lofty goals in mind.  It's all just there to cash in on a box-office phenomenon, and the frustrating thing about that is it's possible to claim Holland and Franklin couldn't think of any way to take this Exile Character further in terms of creativity, when there might have been all sorts of new directions worth exploring.  For instance, why not go with a plot where the boundaries between the otherwise grounded reality of the film's secondary world begins to blur as the plot progresses?

The way this could work is that it all starts out in what seems like a grounded enough reality.  We'd be shown how the main character has an essentially lonely home life, and how he often retreats into fantasies involving Jack Flak as an unacknowledged coping mechanism.  Then would come the witnessing of the murder, and this would be handled naturalistically enough.  It would have to be grounded enough to the point where its easy for the audience to buy into what's happened as something real.  The over-arching motivation of that scene should be to get us on the side of the protagonist with no misgivings whatsoever.  We should be made to believe Davey implicitly, and be able to root for him to succeed.  In fact, I do wonder if an interesting way to make this easier for the audience to go along with would be to take things in a direction that almost seems like it's going to be logical, at least at first.  Why not give the police enough evidence to make them believe David's claims at the start.  Thus putting the main character, his friends, and what's left of his family in a state of heightened fear.  That way when he gets the phone call that Kim has been kidnapped, the villains make it clear they're aware of the traps being laid for them, and they've found ways around them, and now the protagonist must play their game.  This puts Davey in the bind of trying to figure out how to navigate a minefield all by himself.

Here is where the Jack Falk character would come in to play.  It's also where I have to admit that I don't quite know how all this would end, either.  What I would suggest is that here is where things start to take a bit of a surreal turn.  At first it all seems as if Flak is just Davey's way of trying find his way out of whatever suspense filled dilemma he finds himself in.  The initial impression the audience should be given here is that this is just the main lead's way of dealing with his problems.  He's given the more intelligent, problem-solving half of his mind a personification in the imaginary figment of Jack because, let's face it, he's still a little kid.  This is just the way that some young children handle and cope with stress.  So it won't be too much to buy that there's this very clever and intelligent part of Dave's psyche that is alert and capable of handling dangerous situations.  Then, however, comes the moment when we might introduce more interesting twists to the proceedings.  Like the suggestions that Jack gives to Davey to get out of scrapes start to become more technical and difficult.  Let the sort of things he tells the hero to do in order to get out of tight spots grow to be more complex until it becomes clear that David sometimes can't follow the logic of wherever Jack is leading him.  

That's because at some point it becomes obvious we're watching someone with a clearly adult knowledge of how spycraft works, and now it's all he can do to pass on what he knows to a kid who's obviously getting way out of his depth.  You might have a scene where Jack tells Davey to duck into and hide among the heavy equipment of a construction site.  A good way for this idea to go is to play up the realistic aspects of it for a child protagonist.  Let Dave point out that he was always told never to go into places like that, and how it's dangerous, only for Jack to pretty much tell him to march straight in with no further argument.  What follows would be a cat-and-mouse game as the villains search for them among the scaffolding, or artificial hallways made out of lumber packs, and the various machinery.  We'd then see Jack get an idea, and the tell Davey to commandeer a complex piece of equipment like an elevator or a crane and use that to foil the bad guys in some way.  The issue there is that David points out he doesn't have a clue how those things operate, so Jack just guides him through which button to push and when.  It all works, of course, and our heroes get out of a jam.  However the way they succeed should make clear to the audience that they did so through means that a child wouldn't know about.

It's something Davey has no previous knowledge or understanding of, and that should be a clue that things might be taking a turn for the slightly weird.  Here's the part where the crystal ball fails, and the best advice I can give from here on in is to suggest that the plot should take the one bit of novelty Cloak and Dagger has, and then see how far you can take it.  What I mean is there are moments where Holland and Franklin like to play with the idea of just how real the character of Flak is.  There is even one moment where one of the villains can't tell if he's aiming at a blank wall, or an actual secret agent.  It's an interesting idea, yet that's about as far as the film is willing to go with this particular conceit.  My advice would be to see just how far we can go with this plot twist.  Why not create a children's version of a Total Recall scenario where its left up to viewer interpretation if the insanity unfolding around Davey is all for real, or just a fantasy being spun in the main character's head.  It's not the most original idea out there, and it might very well sound hackneyed on some level.  All I can say is it's the best suggestion I got.  I'd also argue it would have been at least a bit more interesting than the actual movie.

At the end of the day, I'm forced to admit this film didn't quite manage to do it for me.  It's pretty clear what a good summation of this whole situation amounts to in retrospect, and once you have the picture in full, it kind of explains explains how things went wrong here.  What happened, first and foremost, is that Steven Spielberg seems to have shocked his professional colleagues with the release of E.T.  Entertain conjecture of a time when no one would have believed a simple pulp premise could contain either so much heart, or an even greater deal of sophistication than it's most ardent fans are aware of.  When Steve debuted that film, it seems to have set a light off somewhere in the public Imagination.  It would be interesting to discover what kind of light was set ablaze in the minds of audiences, yet that's a topic for another time.  What's important for this article is to realize that Spielberg created a pop culture moment, to begin with.  That point must always be kept in mind, because nothing else explains what Richard Franklin and Tom Holland did next.  Like a lot of other studios in a post-E.T. world, everyone was suddenly scrambling to chip off their own piece of that same action.  Which meant you had a lot of studio execs and hanger-on directors and writers playing an ongoing, often fruitless game of copy-cat.

The most egregious example remains the future internet meme that was Mac and Me.  Cloak and Dagger deserves to be considered as part of the phenomenon Spielberg inadvertently helped launch.  What makes it at least somewhat interesting from all the other string of cut-and-paste, however, is that there does seem to have been one or two moments when things could have gotten interesting.  There may have been a legit story fossil lying around somewhere underground, waiting to be excavated.  Even if that's the case, the net result remains something of a botched excavation.  What makes a film like this fascinating at all lies less in the finished product, and more at the conceptual level.  What Franklin and Holland seem to have done was to cast about for ways of hitching their fortunes to E.T.'s rising star.  In looking about for ways to do that, they did at least find an interesting angle to approach the idea with.  They seem to have wondered if it could be combined with an older Film Noir property, one that was first penned long ago as a short story by Cornell Woolrich, and was later turned into a successful feature film starring the original Peter Pan, and one of the former cast members of Citizen Kane.  Holland's idea seems to have been to take all of that, and see if it could be transferred well into the kind of kid's adventure format that Spielberg, didn't really invent, so much as helped make legitimate for everyone.

The fact that Holland and Franklin's brief creative experiment failed still doesn't quite mean that there might have been at least some spark of Inspiration lying about, even if they missed the mark.  What makes a failure like Cloak and Dagger still fascinating on some level is the realization that we're looking at a story that's still waiting to be told in full.  For all their faults with this picture, Holland and Franklin do seem to have hit on a premise with some genuine entertainment merit to it.  They might have failed to realize all of it in this particular outing.  Yet that's not the same as saying that it shouldn't be tried again.  Indeed, it might be worth the effort of revisiting this idea now, in the present day.  It all remains a simple question of how do you make this idea into something that helps complete the picture in a genuinely artistic, yet crowd-pleasing way?  I'd argue that's a pretty good challenge to leave a review like this off on.  At least it means I don't have end it on a complete sour note.  I suppose this means I have to give this one a cautious recommendation, of sorts.  What you'll get is not a good film, as such.  Instead, it's more like watching the filmmakers trying to assemble a workable idea from whatever traces of the story fossil they were able to uncover from out of the ground.  While they aren't able to succeed, they do perhaps leave enough ideas for others to improve on and create in the future.