d**k Tracy (PG)

Artful, colorful, light comics adaptation.

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Movie details

Studio: Touchstone Pictures
Directed By: Warren Beatty
Cast: Warren Beatty, Charles Durning, Dustin Hoffman, William Forsythe
Running Time: 105 minutes
Release Date: 06/15/1990
Video/DVD Release Date: 04/02/2002
Genre: Action/adventure
MPAA Rating: PG
MPAA Explanation: parental guidance

Parents need to know

Parents need to know that there is considerable cartoon-bloodless shooting, bombing, and fighting. Plus, Madonna's lusty character sports an erotic wardrobe. The singer-actress, dating Warren Beatty at the time, was at the height of her self-crowned sex-goddess persona, though her antics stay within PG range. You may not come across them these days, but a series of vintage Dick Tracy cartoons (by the creator of Felix the Cat) and modern-day action figures, peddled in connection with this feature caused controversy for some demeaning racial and social stereotypes (the "Joe the Tramp," figure was a monstrously ugly homeless man).

Families can talk about the surreal style of the film. Does it succeed in being a comic-strip come to life? And which one do kids enjoy better anyway? Would a more "realistic" incarnation of Dick Tracy have been effective? You can, in fact, expose kids to earlier, 1930s and '40s B-movies such as Dick Tracy, Detective and Dick Tracy Vs. Cueball (commonplace on video) that were indeed more down-to-earth productions, far less fantastic than Warren Beatty's vision.

Message
Violence
Sex
Language

Message

Social Behavior:

Dick Tracy is an upstanding and incorruptible lawman, even if he does seem a little tempted away from his girlfriend Tess Trueheart by both the work and the sexy Breathless Mahoney. Ultimately, the mousy, unassertive Tess proves a better love interest than the bold, brassy Breathless, a real old-school Hollywood attitude. A street kid Tracy befriends (who was forced into theft, a la Oliver Twist) looks up to Tracy's virtuous qualities and helps him in crimefighting. High city officials are revealed as corrupt and compromised. The gangsters in particular are grotesquely ugly, not the suave, smooth criminals glamorized in other crime pictures.

Consumerism:

A line of action figures, vintage Dick Tracy cartoons, and toy tie-ins were peddled heavily -- and some of the aggressive marketing backfired when activists complained about the demeaning depictions of minorities and the homeless. At least the Two-Way Wrist radios didn't offend anyone.

Drugs/Alcohol/Tobacco:

Social drinking and smoking.

Violence

"Cartoon violence" in the truest sense. Lots of machine-gun shooting, high-energy fist-fighting and mob hits, via both gunfire and explosions. No blood shown.

Sex

Madonna in particular plays a seductive singer who utters frequent suggestive double-entendres and dresses in low-cut, chest-revealing and skin-tight outfits.

Language

Common Sense says

What's the story?

Reviewed by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Out of the many, many movies to be adapted from comic strips and comic books, DICK TRACY stands out for going to surreal extremes to reproduce the two-dimensional print feel of a vintage Sunday-newspaper color supplement (the sort in which Chester Gould's popular Dick Tracy first appeared in 1931) somehow sprung to life. In a nameless big city, crusading police detective Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty, who also directed), fights a running battle with ambitious gangster boss Big Boy Caprice (Al Pacino), who wants to consolidate all the city's rackets under his leadership. Along the way Tracy and his demure girlfriend Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headley) take in a scrappy street orphan (Charlie Korsmo). Tracy is also slightly distracted from his duties by the tempting Breathless Mahoney (Madonna), an enticing showgirl headlining in a club taken over by Big Boy.

Is it any good?

The movie is a visual marvel, anticipating films like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and 300 by creating a stylized and synthetic world for the flesh-and-blood actors to inhabit. Here it's a screenful of bright solid-color sets, cars, and costumes (replicating how vintage newspapers only had a limited palette of color inks), clearly artificial skylines, and villainous characters encased in grotesque makeup appliances, distorting their faces into the caricatures that Gould drew.

But if you took away the dazzling eye candy, would Beatty's Dick Tracy still be entertaining? Not as much. The dialog is full of cleverness (the way Big Boy misquotes great thinkers and leaders especially), but the plot is like a deliberately generic cops-vs.-crooks potboiler, confusing in its convolutions, with a last-minute-twist mystery villain added to an already-overstuffed bunch of rogues (Pruneface, Flattop, Littleface, Mumbles), many of whom seem to have been thought up, just like Star Wars crowd-shot aliens, to sell a few more action figures. But all those creeps do distract us from one fact: Tracy is a pretty colorless character himself, except for his iconic yellow trench coat and hat.