An over-imaginative eleven-year-old (Henry Thomas), with a superhero named Jack Flack as his imaginary playmate, stumbles upon a real-life espionage plot and is unable to impress the fact on his no-nonsense father (Dabney Coleman, who, with less gray in his hair, also plays Jack Flack). Australian filmmaker Richard Franklin, who directed the Psycho sequel, does nothing to conceal his admiration for Alfred Hitchcock. But it is one thing to copy an occasional camera angle or to borrow a specific plot gambit (the enemy agent with the missing fingers from The Thirty-Nine Steps or the time bomb on the bus from Sabotage), but it is quite another to work these into a sustained sequence. Franklin does the one thing but not the other. He manages to drum up a bit of suspense at the climax, but not enough of it to justify the amount of labor. With Michael Murphy. (1984) — Duncan Shepherd
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