Dick Tracy Is a Warning for Modern Superhero Movies

By this point, it’s not unusual for movies based on comic books to attract top-level names. Legends like Harry Dean Stanton and Robert Redford have appeared in Marvel movies. Heath Ledger, Joaquin Phoenix, and Angela Bassett all earned Academy Award nominations for their parts in superhero films, with Ledger taking home the Best Supporting Actor win for playing the Joker in The Dark Knight.

Even so, it’s still dizzying 35 years later to see the level of talent Warren Beatty assembled for his 1990 passion project, Dick Tracy. Songs were written by Stephen Sondheim and performed by Madonna! New Hollywood greats such as Al Pacino, James Caan, and Dustin Hoffman! Incredible make-up and costume design!

Still, nevertheless, Dick Tracy is a pretty boring film to sit through. And as comic book movies get bigger and more respected, Dick Tracy serves as a cautionary tale. You can have all the good stuff, but no one’s going to watch if there isn’t a good story.

Vibrant and Dull

In 1990 movie theaters across the country started displaying black posters with a brightly colored drawing in the center, featuring a man in a yellow hat speaking into his wrist. “I’m on my way declared the white text below.” Another just showed the man in profile, his face and most of the hat in shadow. “Next summer they’re out to get him,” read the text.

These posters hoped to replicate the incredibly successful ad campaign for the previous year’s Batman, which sold the movie with just a picture of the Batman logo. Yet most of the film’s other similarities to Batman were coincidental. Batman‘s box office dominance did kick off a wave of movies about pulp heroes, including The Phantom and The Shadow, but Disney began production on Dick Tracy in 1988. Even that was a longtime coming, as Beatty had been working to make a Dick Tracy movie since 1975, and even brought aboard John Landis and later Walter Hill to direct. But Beatty’s famously demanding personality and his insistence on comic book aesthetics scared away studios.

Disney greenlit the movie with a firm budget in place and an agreement that Beatty would personally pay for any overages, a bargain the star was willing to make if it gave him full control over the picture. On paper it appears that the gamble worked. Writers Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. of Top Gun fame turned in a stripped-down script that effectively melds plots from the original Chester Gould scripts. Even better, makeup artists John Caglione Jr. and Doug Drexler gave the stars the grotesque appearance of Gould’s drawings, which popped against the four-color sets designed by Richard Sylbert.

To bring his passion project to life, Beatty was able to bring in friends and celebrities, giving Dick Tracy a star-studded cast. Despite the heavy makeup, Pacino and Hoffman put in incredible performances, earning the former a Best Supporting Actor nomination. Somehow William Forsyth outdid them all as the truly terrifying enforcer Flattop. Glenne Headly is perfectly cast as good girl Tess Trueheart, whose plans to marry Tracy are thwarted by femme fatale Breathless Mahoney (Madonna). Breathless meanwhile seeks vengeance against Pacino’s mob boss Big Boy Caprice as mysterious killer the Blank.

It all seemed like it was going to work, at least initially. Dick Tracy not only grossed $162.7 million on a $46 million budget, making it the ninth highest-grossing movie of the year. It even earned award nominations for Pacino and for its makeup and production design. Yet even as it was being bathed in Academy Award recognition, Dick Tracy was considered a middling film and is remembered today as more of an interesting curio than a beloved classic. If there is a cult following, it is a particularly small one.

An Empty Yellow Suit

Midway through Dick Tracy, the titular gumshoe has a lead in the gangland murder case he’s been working. He and his partners have locked one of the film’s signature henchmen—Dustin Hoffman mugging through mountains of makeup as a guy named Mumbles—in an interrogation room where the lights burn bright. Mumbles squeals, but true to his name, everything Mumbles says is garbled, making it impossible for the stenographer (a cameoing Kathy Bates) to record the confession. That is until Tracy reveals that he recorded the interrogation and that he can slow down the tape, transforming Mumbles’ mumbles into a clear declaration: “Big Boy did it.”

That scene captures all the possibilities and problems with Dick Tracy, and they all begin and end with Beatty. Beatty’s passion for the character is clear, not just in the level of talent he brought in through his connections and favors, but in the detailed specificity of his vision. The movie looks so interesting and is so stuffed with characters precisely because he cares so much about it.

But for all of his passion, Beatty doesn’t have a particular take on Tracy the character. In a world filled with striking oddballs, Tracy is all square-jawed seriousness. Unlike most of his castmates, Beatty doesn’t go through the rigors of the makeup chair, so we see only his handsome mug instead of Tracy’s traditional hatchet face.

Even worse, he plays Tracy as a standard tough cop, a cliché we’ve seen a million times and done better. Beatty lets the suit and the yellow hat do most of his acting, unable to set his movie star ego aside long enough for Tracy to come through as a character. In most cases, an exciting supporting cast can overcome a boring lead, and the amazing makeup and production design supercharges Dick Tracy‘s great supporting characters. But Beatty has to be at the center of the movie in nearly every scene, making Tracy a black hole of nothingness that drags the rest of the movie down.

A Star-Studded Warning

At the height of the MCU’s dominance, some wondered if the age of the movie star had died. Captain America, Spider-Man, and Iron Man were the real draws. Audiences didn’t shell out to see Chris Evans, Tom Holland, or Robert Downey Jr. Yet nowadays that accepted wisdom appears to be straining. Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige recently blamed the poor returns of Captain America: Brave New World on viewers’ lack of familiarity with Anthony Mackie‘s Cap. But when looking at the box office returns of Spider-Man: No Way Home, which broke records in large part by bringing back Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield for encore bows, this line of reasoning seems laughably wrong. Clearly, movie stars still matter, even when surrounded by superheroes. And likely even Marvel knows this, otherwise they wouldn’t have spent a large fortune in order to bring Robert Downey Jr. back to the next Avengers film.

But as Marvel and DC remember that movie stars matter, they would also do well to remember the warning of Dick Tracy. You can have incredible design and effects. You can have faithfully adapted characters and costumes that appear as though they’re ripped straight from the comics. You can even have big name stars. But if those stars overshadow the story, or the spectacle is all you can offer moviegoers, audiences will ultimately not care. You’ll end up in the box office equivalent of a limbo where there is no sequel and no significant legacy. Perhaps we’re already getting there again today.