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Parents' Guide to

Dick Tracy

By Charles Cassady Jr., Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 10+

Artful, colorful, light comics adaptation.

Movie PG 1990 105 minutes
Dick Tracy Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Community Reviews

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age 13+

Based on 3 parent reviews

Keegan H.
Keegan H. Adult
August 26, 2020
age 9+

One Of Cinema's Best

The film Dick Tracy is a good film to watch with any child 9 or up. Here is my opinion: Positive Messages: Dick Tracy is a crime fighter, but not that much of a message. Role Models: Dick Tracy and Kid are good role models Violence: Cartoonish Violence is shown, gunshots and guns fire, explosions and fire but no blood or anything Gorey to a limit. Characters die, but nothing incredibly bloody is shown Sex: Kisses are shown. Madonna's character, Patrica "Breathless" Mahoney is seductive, and wears revealing outfits (nothing sensitive is shown) attempts to seduce Tracy a couple times. Language: None Consumerism: None Drinking/Drugs/Smoking: Bars are shown. Characters drink. No one is drunk. Characters smoke as well.
AllAges
AllAges Parent of 8-year-old
August 14, 2020
age 12+

Fun flick, but moreso PG-13

I grew up on the edited-for-television version, which I loved. Madonna’s scenes are often too risqué for younger viewers, especially now that the film can be seen in high definition.

This title has:

Too much sex
See all 3 parent reviews

What's the Story?

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?

Our review:
Parents say (3 ):
Kids say (3 ):

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.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • 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.

Movie Details

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