Strange 1990s movie about cartoons that nobody talked about since the 1950s.
Not my cup of tea, but visually very shot VERY well. Also it is usually wrongly labeled
as a "bomb" which is untrue, It made around $160 million on a $46 million budget.
Go figure...
Dick Tracy is also sort of like the prelude to Hollywood desperately trying to make comic book movies in the 90s that aren't terrible, but kind of fall flat (The Phantom, The Shadow, Steel, Judge Dredd, Tank Girl). Mystery Men, The Rocketeer and The Crow are also in that microcosm, but fared a bit better
Dick Tracy is also sort of like the prelude to Hollywood desperately trying to make comic book movies in the 90s that aren't terrible, but kind of fall flat (The Phantom, The Shadow, Steel, Judge Dredd, Tank Girl). Mystery Men, The Rocketeer and The Crow are also in that microcosm, but fared a bit better
This is a movie I only know about because of the AVGN episode -- I haven't encountered it in any other context, which is remarkably weird to me.
If someone speaks about a film on the internet, no matter how obscure that film may be, I usually find conversation about/around it, but that simply hasn't been the case with this one (not even on the recommendations following another watch of the classic nerd episode). And that? That has peaked my curiosity in a way that's rarely approached these days.
So... Please tell me: is it a good movie? Is it even among your favorites? Would you recommend giving it a watch or should I avoid it like the plague?
The AVGN episode actually made me seek out the movie.
The cool thing about it is that it's shot to look like the comic strip it's based on, so everything in it, from cars to costumes to buildings, is in six colors: red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple, black and white. The villains all had various physical deformities in the comics that they were nicknamed for, such as "Pruneface" (his face is all wrinkled), "Flattop" (the top of his head is completely flat), "Shoulders" (pretty self-explanatory) or "Littleface" (his head is normal-sized, but his face is as small as a normal human nose); the movie achieves all of these with some great-looking latex makeup and some trick photography for Littleface (they put a person inside an oversized head and filmed it in extreme close-up). Here are some of them:
The problem is that the plot itself is very, very thin and spends a lot of the runtime going nowhere because there's nothing much to it. Basically: Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty) wants to put Al Pacino in jail, but can't because he has no evidence; Madonna was a witness to Pacino's latest crime and will testify, but only if Tracy leaves his girlfriend for Madonna. That's pretty much it for about an hour and a half.
At some point the writers just say "eh, screw it, who cares" and pull a sudden "the villains frame the hero for a crime he didn't commit" turn so the movie can have some sort of action for a change (Daniel Waters did the same thing in Batman Returns for similar reasons).
Contemporary reviews criticized it for the characters being flat and one-dimensional, but Roger Ebert rightfully noted that they were missing the point, because it *is* based on a comic strip from the 30s and the characters were meant to be physical manifestations of archetypes rather than people. To quote him: "Tracy should be as square as his jaw".
It's worth seeing for the cinematography, the make up, and Al Pacino overacting his heart out.
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