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When a film places a child in danger, as is the case throughout the 1984 children’s action-adventure filmCloak & Dagger, such a film risks offending an audience’s sensibilities. The ability ofCloak & Dagger, which pushes the boundaries of just how exciting and intense a children’s movie should be, to navigate this tricky genre tightrope represents the film’s supreme achievement.
WhileCloak & Daggerexists within the realm of children’s fantasy, the film also functions as a superior thriller, which incorporates elements of the style and technique of Alfred Hitchcock. In the movie, Henry Thomas plays Davey Osborne, an 11-year-old whose imaginary world collides with reality after Davey witnesses a murder and ishunted by assassins. Although the assassins clearly state their intent to kill Davey, the film never abandons its connection to the world of fantasy. In this world, Davey has an imaginary relationship with fictional super spy Jack Flack, the hero of theCloak & Daggerrole-playing game. Now, Davey must rely on Jack, played byDabney Coleman, to survive in the real world.
Cloak & Daggermitigates the horrifying implications of David’s ordeal by deliberately presenting the film’s villains as being similar to the one-dimensional automatons from David’s fantasy world. The villains in the movie aren’t real people. They have no history. They were born when the film begins, and their only purpose in life is to be villains.This enablesCloak & Daggerto avoid being as dark and disturbing as it otherwise could be.
Davey Osborne Creates a Fantasy World and an Imaginary Hero
Cloak and Dagger
For Henry Thomas, the role of Davey Osborne inCloak & Daggermarked Thomas’s first feature starring role since Thomas’s star-making performance as Elliott in the blockbuster1982 science-fictionfilmE.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. LikeE.T.,Cloak & Daggerdeals with the loss of a parent. While Elliott is affected by the absence of his father following his parents’ divorce, Davey struggles with the recent death of his mother.
Davey’s confusion and grief over his mother’s death led him to retreat further into theCloak & Daggerrole-playing universe and his imaginary relationship with Jack Flack. Davey conceptualized Jack Flack in the image of his father, Dabney Coleman’s Hal Osborne, a military air traffic controller who disapproves of Davey’srole-playing games.
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Cloak & Daggeropens with Jack parachuting into a foreign embassy wearing a retractable chute. After dispatching several security men and stealing a briefcase containing vital documents, Jack is pursued by giant role-playing percentile dice, which roll toward him like boulders. Then Jack transforms into a miniature figure on a cardboard set as part of a board game played in the back of a game store by Davey, Davey’s younger friend Kim, and Morris, the store’s manager.
After Morris sends Davey and Kim on a seemingly harmless errand to obtain a catalog from a game company inside the company’s office building, Davey, while waiting for Kim in a stairwell, witnesses the murder of a company engineer, who gives him aCloak & Daggervideo-game cartridge, which contains top-secret military information. From this point in the film,Davey’s journey encompasses not only his need to survive,but also the need for him to bothlet go of his griefover his mother’s death and reduce his dependency on the fantasy games that have consumed his imagination.
Cloak & Dagger Is a Hitchcockian Children’s Thriller
Cloak & Dagger, loosely based on the 1949 boy-who-cried-wolf thrillerThe Window,was directed by Richard Franklin, an Alfred Hitchcock devotee whopreviously directedPsycho II, the 1983 sequel to the classic 1960 horror filmPsycho.Cloak & Daggeremploys a variation of Hitchcock’s core theme of an innocent man wrongly accused of a crime by portraying Davey Osborne as a disbelieved boy accused of being a liar by his father and the police. This reinforces his connection to the imaginary Jack Flack, whom he must rely on to escape various dangerous situations in the film.
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Franklin applies a palpable sense of menace to idyllic or ordinary settings, in which danger subsequently appears in seemingly every corner of the screen. After escaping the assassins at a city park, Davey boards a bus, only to discover, along with the audience, the presence of a tailing van. The van initially appears as a background speck but increasingly grows in stature until he begs the driver to stop the bus and let him off.
Cloak & Daggeralso contains a version ofHitchcock’s popular MacGuffinobject in the form of theCloak & Daggergame cartridge. While the cartridge’s top-secret contents are briefly visible in the film, the most important aspect of the cartridge is the fact that various people are seemingly willing to kill Davey for it.
Jack Flack Always Escapes Until Children Stop Believing
After memorable supporting roles in the films9 to 5,Tootsie, andWarGames,Cloak & Daggermarked the first feature starring role for Dabney Coleman, who died on August 03, 2025, at the age of 92. Henry Thomas, who received top billing inCloak & Dagger, is now 52, the same age that Coleman was when the film was released in 1984.
The concept of age is paramount inCloak & Daggerregarding the weakening hold that fictional childhood heroes like Coleman’s Jack Flack have on pre-teen boys like Davey Osborne as time goes on. This correlates directly to the film’s emotional climax, in which Davey, having let go of Jack, realizes that his greatest hero is his father.Cloak & Daggeris available to rent oniTunesandPrime Video.
