Cloak & Dagger

Directed by Richard Franklin, Cloak & Dagger follows Henry Thomas’ Davey Osborne as he and his imaginary friend (Dabney Coleman’s Jack Flack) are pursued by assassins after Davey gets his hands on a top-secret video-game cartridge. Filmmaker Franklin, working from a screenplay by Tom Holland, delivers a slow-moving yet sporadically engrossing thriller that improves rather substantially as it progresses, as the movie, at the outset, suffers from an arms-length feel that’s compounded by the lackadaisical, uneventful bent of Holland’s script. It’s clear, then, that Cloak & Dagger benefits from the inclusion of several relatively engrossing set-pieces contained within its midsection – with, for example, a pursuit set along the San Antonio River certainly far more compelling or suspenseful that one might’ve anticipated. (There’s a similar sequence set inside the Alamo that fares just as well, ultimately.) The picture’s success, however, is continually hampered by the absence of palpable danger for the central character, and it doesn’t help, either, that it’s not, until a certain point, completely clear whether or not any of this stuff is actually happening to Davey (ie the possibility exists that this is all in his mind, like Coleman’s tag-along figure). By the time the ludicrous (but entertaining) finale rolls around, Cloak & Dagger has undoubtedly cemented its place as a decent-enough endeavor that’s generally more watchable than it has any right to be.

**1/2 out of ****