Dick Tracy

Warren Beatty's production of Dick Tracy approaches the material with the same fetishistic glee I felt when I was reading the strip.

Dick Tracy is light on its feet where Batman clomped and wheezed, and it's fantastic -- that's the word -- where Batman was merely well designed. [15 Jun 1990, p.G5]

Dick Tracy is a class act: simple, stylish, sophisticated, sweet.

Surprisingly sweet and good-natured, Dick Tracy is a highly stylized piece of fluff that's easier to digest than the ponderous pretensions of the equally over-hyped Batman.

Warren Beatty's new tour de force about the ax-jawed detective is generally fun to watch. Visually, it's brilliant. Dramatically, it's OK. [15 Jun 1990, p.3F]

Dick Tracy is an ambitiously vainglorious effort, expensive, beautifully appointed, but at its core empty as a spent bullet. It asks us to read these comics without a grain of salt or a pinch of irony.

Tracy is Tinseltown's annual celebration of everything that's wrong with itself: the hype, the agent-negotiated star system, the Hollywood "fun" assembly-line method of copy-cat mediocrity, etc.

"**** Tracy" is an absolutely gorgeous movie. You can tell that everyone involved cared so much about the quality of their work. The shot compositions, the prosthetics, and Pacino's performance are all so terrific, but for everything going for it, the movie lacks some quality that I can't quite put my finger on, and without it, "**** Tracy" simply isn't that much fun to watch. I would certainly recommend sitting through it once just to marvel at what quality movie making can look like, but don't expect it to change your outlook on life the way a truly great film would. I give it a B - Next time you’re in the mood for a movie, this one won’t disappoint

I enjoyed this a lot but Madonna really does let it down though mainly wooden acting.

A boldly literal interpretation of what was already, at the time, sixty-year-old source material, **** Tracy was dated before it even commenced filming. In today's world, it's a painful reminder of what happens when badly misread cultural trends, aging showbiz producers and a full committee of writers collide on-screen. Visually, it's a day-glow disaster that combines recklessly outlandish wardrobe, distractingly obvious matte paintings, startlingly grotesque makeup effects and an odd mix of kids' primary colors with ink-black film noir lighting. The cast is so stale, weak and one-dimensional that not even an A-list staff of Hollywood's elite is able to play life preserver. Dustin Hoffman, James Caan and Al Pacino are lost amidst the flood of stilted dialogue, Madonna sleepwalks through an embarrassing performance as, basically, herself, and Warren Beatty is so squeaky clean and unrelentingly straightforward in the leading role that it almost works on a satirical level. Clearly someone, somewhere, saw the runaway success of Tim Burton's Batman and chose to grant a similar treatment to a character they recalled from the funny pages of their own youth, without stopping to consider if Tracy's story was as relevant and trans-generational as Bruce Wayne's. The splashy colors and simple, hackneyed plot make it a no-sell to adults, while the abundance of sex and violence also makes it tough to buy as a kid's movie. Genuinely awful from start to finish, I had to watch in three installments because it kept putting me to sleep.