A yellow trench coat is his trademark: police detective Dick Tracy works tirelessly to build a case and arrest "Big Boy" Caprice, the mob boss who united all other mob bosses under his rule to control the city and impose a racket on every business. Tracy adopts a little boy who witnessed the murder of gangsters by Caprice's gang, but his inclination towards Caprice's showgirl Breathless Mahoney costs Tracy his relationship with girlfriend Tess. An unknown masked man frames Tracy for murder, but the police still allow him to attack Caprice's headquarters. In the finale on gears, Caprice shoots the masked man, and in the ensuing fight, Tracy throws Caprice down a shaft to his death. The masked man turns out to be Mahoney. Tracy reunites with Tess.
Warren Beatty's 3rd feature length film as a director, "Dick Tracy" is an untypical choice for him, a comic-book adaptation with cult status that could go in a double bill with Burton's "Batman" released a year earlier: squeaky colors (especially yellow and green which are almost fluorescent), over-the-top set-designs, cartoonish villains with impossibly looking faces ("Little Face" has a face as wide as a pumpkin; "Pruneface" looks like The Thing from Fantastic Four) and exaggerated action all form elements of this peculiar achievement. It shows organized crime and mafia in a very specific, childlike way, whereas Beatty himself is pretty good as the title hero. However, after the viewers get used to this opulent world, the storyline becomes somewhat stale, routine and standard, without much inspiration or higher creative lift-offs, which is why the "wow" effect starts to melt away exponentially in the second half. For a homage to old crime and film noir films, "Dick Tracy" needed more snappy dialogue, such as the exchange between Tracy and Mahoney (Madonna): "Whose side are you on?" - "The side I'm always on. Mine." The best was achieved from the excellent Al Pacino as villain "Big Boy" Caprice, who "chews the scenery" and enjoys hamming it up big time, without ever losing the realistic, grounded touch. In one of the funniest scenes, where Caprice has rounded up all mob bosses and demands that he becomes their boss, "Pruneface" interrupts him to lament again: "I say we kill Tracy now!" - "I say you say nothing!" Dustin Hoffman, on the other hand, is wasted as bizarre caricature henchman "Mumbles", since you cannot make out what he is saying. "Dick Tracy" is an effective and attractive film, it is only that the people behind the set-designs showed more creativity than the authors behind the camera.
Grade:++
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