Did you people see the same film I saw?

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

(Credit IMDb) 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.This is one of those strange films from the 80's that has a certain charm to it. I wouldn't exactly say I enjoyed myself thoroughly, but I was never bored, somewhat entertained. One thing I really admired about this movie was the originality. I haven't seen anything like this movie and that is a good thing. This movie doesn't really know what it wants to fully be. Sometimes it takes itself very seriously, others it is more for comedic effort. It manages to combine adventure, action, drama, and comedy, It just struggled to balance them all properly. Despite all of that, it managed to keep my attention for the most part by surprising me with decent twists and turns. If you're a fan of 80's songs like I am, you're going to love the soundtrack for this movie. It features Nik Kershaw, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and more. The acting is decent. Anthony Edwards is fine in the lead role, albeit, a trifle bland at times. He was a bit too cool and blasé for my liking at times and didn't show enough angst. Linda Fiorentino is very sexy with a decent enough accent for her part. She played her role well and had OK chemistry with Edwards. Jsu Garcia is fun as Edward's best buddy. Nightmare on Elm Street fans should have fun watching him Final Thoughts: You'd never see a movie made like this today. This is pure 80's my friends. As long as you don't expect too much, you'll have an OK time. It's a decent movie5.8/10

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.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.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.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.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".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.

A very hairy Anthony Edwards stars as a teenager caught up in Cold War espionage in GOTCHA. He meets and falls hard for a femme fatale (Linda F.) on a European vacation and ends up following her into Russian-held East Berlin (this was 1985, remember). She slips an item in his backpack and he's off and running, and returning to the western world does nothing to stop KGB thugs from coming after him. Edwards is in almost every scene and does a fine job portraying a naive nebbish. Linda F. is her usually sexy self, and in th end has a couple of surprises for our very young and very stupid hero. But the movie is at best a throwaway, and probably was from the day it first appeared. The music is typical awful '80s era schlock. You may safely skip this one.

What can I say, but this is one of those "eighties movies" featuring Anthony Edwards before he was "Goose" and Linda Fiorentino before she was that chick in M.I.B.Plot Summary: A paintball enthusiast utilizes his finely tuned skill at hiding behind things when he gets involved with a CIA courier working behind the Iron Curtain. East Germany meets West L.A. with some really funny stereo-types that weren't all that tired when this movie came out in '85. This film is primarily aimed at entertaining young men with a 007 lust. Still, there are so many one-liners and funny bits that my sister and I still make references to this movie when joking around, e.g. "I thought he was KGB from Russia." ~ "He's a CPA from Encino! Are you outta your mind?"The utilization of various on-location landmarks make it fun and almost like a travelogue movie. There's a German fortress, the Louvre (pre-pyramid entrance), the eiffel tower, the UCLA campus, Olvera Street in Downtown L.A., and the Bonnaventure Hotel.I also love this movie for introducing me to Pernod, and the scene in which it is introduced is so funny I can still remember it line for line!! I love this movie!!