Beatty directs this like a man who hasn't watched a movie in more than a decade

You know that great quality movies like Raiders and Back to the Future have, where the action of one scene rolls effortlessly into the next, propelling the movie forward and building narrative momentum?

Dick Tracy doesn't have that

Beatty will escape an uninvolving action scene by leaping onto a speeding car, then the next scene will be him cooking breakfast

That kind of transition's been part of movie editing since Eisenstein was in short pants, but because the previous scenes never pay off, the effect is desultory

The whole movie's like that - Pacino's villain outlines a scheme to unite the city's criminals with himself as their leader, but all that amounts to is a scene where he coaches a chorus line

There's a central spine to the movie, a storyline about whether the bachelor hero will settle down to family life - which seems like the kind of thing a canny script writer does when pitching a movie to flatter and appeal directly to the vanity of an ageing shagger like Beatty

But the film has less interest in the action and the main plot than Madonna's moll has in the oyster-slurping sugar daddy Pacino takes off her hands by burying him in concrete

Beatty would rather be making Reds, and it shows

Thanks to Vittorio Storarro's incredibly cinematography and fantastic production and costume design, the movie does actually have a lot to recommend it

The idea of replicating the four-colour printing process of newspaper strips is inspired, abandoning naturalism in favour of a vibrant palette that transforms ordinary scenes into visual feasts

There's one scene of Beatty stepping out of a car where someone's just thrown down a bucket of lurid yellow dye to represent a puddle that transforms something mundane into a spectacle

The film looks extraordinary, developing a unique aesthetic that would have provided a template for how big budget spectacles could have looked in the nineties if CG hadn't come along and disrupted the craft of physical movie making

The effect achieved is actually quite similar to what contemporary films like Dunkirk achieve by pushing a single colour in the grading process, so I suppose Storarro's aesthetic prophesised the future of film making after all

The film's use of prosthetics deserves special attention, too, transforming minor characters, like Flat Top, into the stars of this movie. Al Pacino's latex enhancement is the most subtle as well as the most convincing, making him look like a hybrid of Richard Kiel and Sylvester Stallone

Pacino's performance deserves a mention. It's a commonplace that the villains of this sort of movie is the best role, but Pacino takes what he's given and aims for the back of the stands

His ranting, deformed Big Boy Caprice is a ball of energy that has the inexhaustible manic force of Quilp from The Old Curiosity Shop. The script gives him one entertaining rhetorical quirk, of misattributing and misquoting figures from history, which is fun for anyone paying attention

Pacino's serving the same function here as Nicholson in the previous year's Batman - an Oscar winner having fun delivering an over-the-top villain performance and lending the production some kudos

Tim Burton's Batman movie obviously played a huge part in this film being given the green light, and if that wasn't obvious from Danny Elfman being hired to provide the score then the film's thirties setting hammers that home

Films like Flash Gordon and Richard Donner's Superman went a weird never-when feel, where everything was filmed in the real world but felt like thirties origins of the source material

Only John Huston's Annie adopted the comic strip's temporal setting. Burton's Batman was ostensibly set in the modern day, but everyone except Kim Basinger's dressed like they're in It's a Wonderful Life.

If Batman hadn't already proven that retro aesthetic worked with modern audiences, I'm sure Beatty would have updated the timeline a little or gone for a fudge similar to Superman.

With his sights primarily set on Big Boy Caprice (Al Pacino), Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty) tries to round up a number of gangsters. At the same time, he informally adopts a street kid (Charlie Korsmo), encounters problems with girlfriend Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headly), and flirts with Breathless Mahoney (Madonna).

If I were to rate Dick Tracy only on production design--sets, matte paintings, costumes, special make-up, color schemes, and so on--I wouldn't hesitate to give it a 10. Throughout its length, the film looks fantastic--like a surreal, day-glo, pop art film noir. Super saturated primary and secondary colors dominate, occasionally offset by rich tertiary colors. The colors are consistently combined in effective, varied and intriguing ways. The surreal "locations" are a combination of matte paintings and sets seamlessly melded in a manner that remains technically impressive. The make-up effects for Dick Tracy's bizarre characters are excellent. They manage to both capture the precise look of the comic books villains and appear realistic at the same time. If the film were just a set of art photos and/or paintings, it would be one of the masterpieces of at least the 1990s.

However, as a film, there's a story that writers Jim Cash and Jack Epps, Jr. want to tell. That story is a complete mess. For some godforsaken reason, Cash and Epps try to include every villain from the Tracy comics that they can remember. They seem to also include half of the plot lines they can remember. But they forget to write in any explanation or motivation for why Tracy is going after whomever he's going after at a given moment. Combined with overly quick, abrupt editing that too often bounces back and forth between unrelated scenes, the plot seems as if Cash and Epps set out bullet points of villains, villain interconnections and schemes, then threw them together almost randomly in a string of non-sequiturs.

Characters played by well-known and capable actors are completely wasted. There's just not enough time to get into them. Others, such as Madonna, seem to have demanded contractual clauses that guaranteed screen time (in this case featuring singing) whether the appearance serviced the story or not. Some of the cast, such as Pacino, crazily overact. Others, such as William Forsythe as Flattop, turn in understated performances. I don't mind either style (and who is more fun to watch chewing scenery than Pacino?) but Beatty, who also directed, appears to have not known what he wanted to shoot for in that capacity. Part of the problem could be confusion due to the script being such a mess. Beatty, by the way, displays a peculiar inability to change his facial expression, which remains cemented in a seemingly new character--I'll name him "Frogface"--throughout the film (maybe that's how Beatty always is and I just didn't notice it so much before). In terms of his vocal phrasing and general emoting, Beatty portrays Tracy as a cross between Bob Newhart, Keanu Reeves and Harrison Ford. I like all of those other actors, and I'm definitely a fan of oddities, but in this context, I'm not sure it works. I was never a big reader of the Tracy comics, though. Maybe it's a perfect fit, but I'm guessing that it makes as much sense as Gilbert Gottfried as Batman (which, come to think of it, I'd like to see, but obviously more as a spoof).

There appear to be fans of this film, so the plot must not be such a mess and the performances must not be so questionable in everyone's opinion. For my part, I suggest that you watch the film like a slide show while you put on a couple CDs for a soundtrack and ignore any pretense of a story.

"Dick Tracy" holds up surprisingly well. And just to get the negative out of the way . . . Ugh, Madonna is awful. Her half-assed line deliveries drag every one of her scenes. In all fairness, I'm not a Sondheim guy, so the songs aren't my cup of tea, either (same problem I had with "Sweeney Todd"), but it's astounding how dead weight she is.

But in spite of that burden, the movie stands as a love letter to the comic strip medium and the period; the artful shot compositions, the gorgeous matte paintings, and my god the chroma saturation. This thing's a visual feast. Warren Beatty created a pretty cool world to visit, populated with coppers, hoods, fedoras, Tommy guns and flying fists. It's simplistic, but that's it's charm. And a lot of love went into this.

It brings back memories of that Summer in 1990 with the marketing-as-pop-art campaign, and it's totally Disney's grab at "Batman" levels of success (even nabbing Danny Elfman, although his score is a high point).

But it's still some good comic book fun.

7/10