Dick Tracy [1990]

Ten years on, there's something very 'late 80s' about this expensive, overstuffed comic strip movie. Impressive art direction and brilliantly-disguised cameo players fail to compensate for the wooden centre of director Warren Beatty's yellow-coated supercop. Also, it has Madonna in it, at the height of her self-reflexive icon wannabe period, marcelled like Jean Harlow and wiggling like Monroe but conveying no character of her own, like a pod person movie star. Major compensations include Glenne Headly's genuine performance as Tracy's long-suffering girlfriend and Al Pacino's fake one as grotesque gangster Big Boy Caprice. R.G. Armstrong [Pruneface] and William Forsythe [Flattop] were clearly born to play Dick Tracy villains.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Empire [issue unknown]

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