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.

"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