depressing Dick Tracy Starring Madonna and Warren Beatty
Reviewed by DAVID GRANT Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a comic or is it a film? No! Its Warren Beatty in Dick Tracy! From the man who brought you Reds comes another over-long and under-edited Hollywood epic.
Dick Tracy, the movie, (as opposed to the T-shirt, poster, etc) takes the world of the comic book hero and animates it with bigname stars, hamming it up for all they're worth. With no real intention of trying to add another dimension to the two that the characters posses on the original printed page, we find Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino and Madonna tum in adequate, but immediately forgettable performances, in what is actually a rather predictable and boring romp.
True, it looks very impressive, and in fact does look like a comic book. But then with one of the best camera operators in the world, Victorio Storare, guiding things along. you would hardly expect less.
It makes you wonder why he, and all the others for that matter, bothered. Can it really be just for the money? Perhaps the amounts involved are sufficient motivation. Quantity has a quality all of its own, as a certain famous film critic, VI Lenin, once remarked.
Or perhaps its that these films always seem to promise so much more, both to the actors and audiences? Certainly the hype attached to each succeeding blockbuster always manages
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to catch my attention and I dutifully pay up to take in each extravaganza as it rolls along. It seems that, in Britain at least, this is something of a trend. Box office audiences are up. Films released in America, that once took months to reach audiences here, are now winging their way across the Atlantic without any delay.
But these films are almost always a disappointment. Why?
Perhaps its because there are such huge sums of money invested in them that the producers and directors are under enormous pressure to go for safe, and therefore inevitably simple, subjects, styles and characters. Ironically. despite the huge amounts of risk capital involved, risk is a factor almost always absent from the script.
Which is why bringing comic books to life is in vogue. It is a world inhabited by characters whose moral and personal codes are one-dimensional (Oh, alright, two then) and known in advance. The goodies are good, the baddies, bad. Anyone who doesn't fit into either of these categories will not survive the film. Witness the fate of Breathless Mahoney (Madonna). Let's face it, a temptress who engages in a spot of cross-dressing and role-reversal is hardly likely to make it in Dick's clean-shaven, straight 'n' proud America.
And clean it most certainly is! Part of the appeal of this type of fantasy is that it shows you a world where, even if the city is full of gangsters and crime, at Jeast the streets are clean. Its a world where you can career around in your car, guns blazing. without encountering traffic jams, and park without fear of clamping. And there's another, rather more disturbing, aspect to this fabled American city. There don't appear to be any black people in it!
Like Batman and the Schwarzeneggar films, Dick Tracy is testimony to the paucity of ideas emenating from the American film industry. A safe, smug, conservative morality tale, its box-office success is a depressing reminder of the comic strip agenda that neoliberals like Reagan, Bush and Thatcher have established as reality.
But that's another horror movie entirely. And thankfully a script which, we as the audience, Page 30
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