Dick Tracy (1990) A decade before Marvel superheroes clogged up movie theaters until we all finally became sick of them, Hollywood had a fling with the sooper-dooper guys of the 1930's......
These four potential tentpole franchise hopefuls rolled out between 1990 and 1996. Set in a simpler age of primal good and evil, they featured stalwart hunks with ironclad moral compasses. They did battle with homegrown gangsters, Nazis, immortal warlords and pirates, pausing only briefly for chaste kisses with their spunky, resourceful gal pals.
Each of them were (and still are) loads of fun to watch. And yet each of them failed to command enough of a vast worldwide audience to ever insure sequels. They remain one-offs and we wouldn't hold our breath waiting for any studio to risk reviving them.........
But we love 'em just the same....
Let's start with Warren Beatty's drippingly colorful attempt to duplicate Chester Gould's comic strip about lantern-jawed police detective Dick Tracy, the country's most upstanding foe of grotesque, big city criminals.
And by grotesque, we mean their nicknames corresponded to their repulsive physical deformities.....villains warped in both body and mind.....(So the hood named 'Flat Top' has a head that's literally.....well, you get it, right? Don't even get us started on the one named Little Face......)
Beatty spared no expense to drench this film in the overwhelming artifice of a comic book universe.....blinding, primary colors only, cityscapes rendered with gorgeous, suitable-for-framing mattes and makeup and costumes designed to look like the ultimate Halloween party.
(In doing so, the notoriously slow moving, meticulous Beatty incurred the wrath of the new budget-conscious regime at Disney, prompting exec Jeffrey Katzenberg to spew out a long scolding memo about the perils of expensive, self-indulgent productions. )
The movie? A sight to see, to say the very least. Amid the painterly, cartoon backdrops, there's a host of familiar actors under layers of rubberized prosthetics....(Dustin Hoffman, Paul Sorvino, R.G. Armstrong, William Forsythe and many more). There's Madonna, vamping and vogue-ing it up as a saloon moll warbling sly Stephen Sondheim send-ups of nightclub songs.
And most prominently, there's Al Pacino as the film's prime gangster villain, a roaring, raging hunchbacked madman....as is he's Michael Corleone with dementia and frothing-at-the-mouth rabies combined.
But sadly, in middle of all these deliberate exaggerations, Beatty's mundane, barely there portrayal of the title character leaves a gaping hole in the proceedings. He sleepwalks through the role as if he was temporarily filling in for some better actor who might turn up later. Mostly, his main function is to inhabit the ultra bright yellow top coat that swirls around him as he strides through all the artfully brilliant renditions of a cartoon world.
Since there's no point to the film beyond the overwhelming creativity that went into its visuals, viewers could only latch on the only two characters with the closest resemblance to human beings.... a streetwise orphan known as 'the kid' (Charley Korsmo and Tess Trueheart (an excellent Glenn Headley), Tracy's sweet but feisty girlfriend.
As for Madonna, she works to the usual limit of her ability.....to strike a pose.
For all its deficiencies as an actual real movie, "Dick Tracy" is still a one-of-a-kind feast for the eyes. While we've no idea what led Warren Beatty to apply his expensive, time-consuming micro-managing filmmaking to what seems like, for him, such trivial material, the film's a must-see for anyone who doesn't mind losing themselves in a fantasy world for a few hours.
3 stars (***). Next up, the Disney studio takes another crack at a 1930's hero.....only this guy can literally blast off.....stay tuned.
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