Synopsis
Their turf. Their game. Their rules. They didn't count on HIS law...
The comic strip detective finds his life vastly complicated when Breathless Mahoney makes advances towards him while he is trying to battle Big Boy Caprice's united mob.
1990 Directed by Warren Beatty
The comic strip detective finds his life vastly complicated when Breathless Mahoney makes advances towards him while he is trying to battle Big Boy Caprice's united mob.
Warren Beatty Madonna Glenne Headly Al Pacino Mandy Patinkin Dustin Hoffman Kathy Bates Dick Van Dyke Catherine O'Hara James Caan Charlie Korsmo Michael Donovan O'Donnell Jim Wilkey Stig Eldred Neil Summers Chuck Hicks Lawrence Steven Meyers William Forsythe Ed O'Ross Marvellee Cariaga Michael Gallup Seymour Cassel James Keane Charles Durning Allen Garfield John Schuck Charles Fleischer Paul Sorvino Robert Costanzo Show All…
Every single comic book movie should be this unabashedly unrestrained with its visual style. Realism is boring, show me a world I can’t imagine! Give your villains flat heads and melted faces and put ‘em in bright purple cars. Fuck it, put James Caan and Dustin Hoffman under prosthetics too, why not? Insane how invisibly stacked this cast is. You see the names in the beginning but the credits roll and you’re shocked all over again.
Al Pacino is the greatest actor that has ever and will ever live. Hoo-ah!
“No words. Should’ve sent a poet.”
That’s where I come in.
The George H.W. Bush years are some of our most culturally significant in terms of oddness. The Reagan years were over and it was no longer morning in America. It was early afternoon and there was a strange cultural hangover from the eight years of red state repression and red scare conformity. Something was coming. Nobody knew it was an economic boom led by a charismatic pedophile but it was coming. Only in retrospect do those tea leaves make any sense. And one of the biggest and clearest is 1990’s Dick Tracy, the story of a tough-on-crime pervert with a politician’s good looks and a politician’s moral vacuum in…
I don't care about anything that's happening in it but this is one of the best-looking things ever made
This movie has deep “majorly-mixed-critical-response-however-a-four-star-review-from-Roger-Ebert” vibes!
Imagine you're a Disney executive and you want a piece of that sweet Burton Batman money so you give Warren Beatty a truckload of money and Danny Elfman and you say, "give us a comic book movie" and then every day you check the dailies and you wonder what the fuck Beatty is doing.
97
The totality of artifice. A reminder that we were once inspired by the palette and production design of Tim Burton, serials, comic-book television, and Film Noir, and not the esteemed filmography of Jon Favreau. Batman 89 kicked a few of these copy-cats into gear, and Dick Tracy, above all, is the elusive, romantic cousin that ignores the flab and cuts straight to the point. Basically a caped-crusader movie if it was made by an aging proponent of New Hollywood. It's absolutely insane. Dustin Hoffman plays a character named 'mumbles', Madonna is there to just be Madonna, Al Pacino is so hammy and dedicated to his preposterous motions that I'm shocked that he even recovered. It's all a joy -…
Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy! Tracy!…
Larger than life in every aspect—brimming with exaggerated style, loads textures, and montages upon montages upon montages, I still think this is right up there as my kind of perfect comic book movie goes... 1000% more genuine and entertaining than some (not all) of the numerous bubblegum mass (or mouse) produced superhero pork stick wanking jabroni movies we get today... plus this cast of characters (that’s an understatement!) will always be better in this—the best compliment I could ever give someone or something is say “they look like a Dick Tracy villain”.
Anyways... this movie slaps, everyone hates this and Batman 89 now (you’re all wrong), and Madonna is amazing here.
mesmerizing. feels deeply bloated at 100 minutes. still, an incredible salve to modern blockbuster filmmaking. there's really something to this large-scale, practical-effects heavy, pastiche blockbusters of the early 90s (like this or Barry Levinson's Toys). it's the budget excess that Hollywood then tried to hard to clamp down on. but it's beautiful, beautiful, beautiful to behold in retrospect
(my screening was inspired by Todd Vanderwerff's great article www.vox.com/2015/6/17/8790397/dick-tracy-movie-25)
"The way I see it, and Plato agrees with me, is that there is what is, and then there is what we would like it to be. Well, that's not important. What's important is the future, is planning ahead. 'A man without a plan is not a man.' Nietzsche. Wait a minute. Wait. I'm having a thought. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I'm gonna have a thought. It's coming...it's gone. Let's rise above the tide. Take that journey, that journey into that faraway land, a land that just waits. It waits by the track, where the train of destiny must run, run into the future, breaking the shackles of the past. Forget the past. Forget the -- our limitations are our shackles. Put them behind you forever."
"Police brutality, boys. And this is the fifth time. Lucky for me I don't bruise easily."
Its a fun movie with a great cast that features typically solid performances from Pacino & Beatty, but the look is what is so memorable about this film. It all comes together to create a pretty singular vibe that hasn't quite been matched since.
MVP: Richard Sylbert & Rick Simpson (Art Directors)
Fun movie that does a really great job of bringing a comic to the live action big screen and maintaining that comic strip or book feel. The world that’s created is perfect with vast, colorful cityscapes - but then the individual scenes/settings themselves do a nice job of really only including the necessities and not too much fine detail - much like they’d been drawn in a panel. Pacino looks like he’s having a lot of fun chewing it all up, and Madonna is actually pretty good too. The story’s not particularly heavy or anything, but this is the kinda movie that’s nice have around to throw on when you just wanna watch and fun for awhile. It doesn’t feel like those are around very much anymore these days.
Do you ever feel like a movie was made just for you?
The design is just... impeccable. Everything is balls-to-the-wall comic book insanity. Al Pacino goes completely batshit as only he can. Plus, Mandy Patinkin singing Sondheim?? Come on!!!
I actually really like Madonna in this too
Love the visual idiosyncrasy here, tip of the biggest, old timey hat to Warren Beatty for achieving this look. I was prepared for the colorful sets and costumes but the ridiculous makeup really made it feel other worldly. I mean, Al Pacino is gonna go for it in a role like this so you might as well pile on the prosthetics to make it more memorable.
Wish there was more to praise beyond that. The plotting is poor, packing a way too big story into a movie trying to be light on its feet. The romantic triangle is wholly unnecessary and never works for me. It has my least favorite contrivance where woman #1 walks in on woman #2 (usually a…
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