Dick Tracy

As is so often the case with aspiring auteur Warren Beatty, the outcome of his efforts (with the exception of Reds, 1981) is a good deal less than his evident ambitions, .

Dick Tracy which was produced under Disney's Touchstone banner, with its garishly coloured cartoon world is too obviously akin to the Warners/Tim Burton smash Batman which came out the preceding year.  Sadly with its uninspired, rambling storyline it never manages to balance its two-dimensional hyper-real cartoon universe with the requirement for credible dramatic engagement, giving us spectacle but no substance. An attempt to add some depth with a sub-plot involving Tracy's personal life fails to fill in the emptiness.

The film has a great cast, besides Beatty who plays the Charles Gould hero, there's Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Elliot Gould, James Caan and Charles Durning amongst others but most of them are under latex masks and there is nothing here that any of them would want to be remembered for. Pacino is amusing as the psychopathic Big Boy Caprice but his performance is not in the league of Nicholson's Joker and what possessed Hoffman to play the minor role of Mumbles is a mystery because mumbling is all that he gets to do. 

The film, which was photographed by master cinematographer Vittorio Storaro in high gloss, eye-gouging colour revels in its cartoon style (it won Art Direction and Make-up Oscars) but the thunderous score by Danny Elfman (who had fared much better with Batman) only rubs-in the general feeling of over-saturation whilst Madonna, who, whilst faring quite well as Big Boy's moll, only manages to further skew the film away from coherence with her characterless singing of the Stephen Sondheim songs including the Oscar-winning 'Sooner Or Later (I Always Get My Man)'.

A few good musical numbers would have considerably lifted this film and perhaps put it in its right space. As it is is an expensive waste of everyone's time.

 

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