Dick Tracy Special

This thirty minute short documentary has old movies expert Leonard Maltin narrating the - largely movie -- history of Chester Gould's square-jawed comic hero with an appearance by Warren Beatty wearing his yellow outfit from his turn as the detective. Beatty is very funny when "he" speaks about "himself" and "his" issues with Beatty's version of Tracy -- issues which I had myself when the movie came out.

The real point of this piece is to show the great affection that Warren Beatty has for the character of Dick Tracy and the manner in which he plays Dick in the interview shows it. The quiet good humor plays very well and I think you will enjoy it.

I enjoy Leonard Maltin in the few documentaries I've seen him showing up, and he does a good job here. The documentary part of this is nice, even though it's a bit short. I'd love to see a proper documentary on Dick Tracy, but I'll take what I can get.

Warren Beatty's part in this confused me, I looked it up online and it seems like it was made so he could keep the rights to the character. And now it all makes sense. If this had been a regular documentary, they might have lost the rights to the character, but including Dick Tracy as a character in this, they make it a movie rather than a doc.

Not too much time is spent on Beatty pretending to be Tracy, but it's still too much. The gag where he is commenting on Beatty's performance was predictable. They also spent to much time just showing clips from previous Tracy movies.

All in all, there's no reason to see this if you are not a die hard fan of either the character, or Beatty. It served its purpose (letting them keep the rights), and there's not much worth in it besides that.

This is a thoroughly unnecessary televised event, and the only reason we have it is because Warren Beatty needed to substantiate some sort of product with Dick Tracy or else he would lose the rights to the character. That's it. It's a placeholder.

Dick Tracy Special (2010)

*** (out of 4)

Weird short has Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty) sitting down with historian Leonard Maltin for a nearly 30-minute interview where the detective talks about his life in the comics, radio and movies. This is a pretty strange little featurette that manages to be entertaining but I must admit there were times that the thing just came across weird and especially during the scenes where Tracy, being played by Beatty, starts to comment on the 1990 film that Beatty made. These scenes just have such a weird tone to them but at the same time it was pretty interesting hearing him comment on the film. It's weird because you don't really know if it's Tracy commenting on the film or if Beatty, through the character, is telling you how he feels. If these are Beatty's thoughts, it's interesting to hear about what he didn't like with his film. Maltin basically narrates the entire history of Tracy through his career and we get to see clips from the serials, "B" films of the 1940s and of course the 1990 feature. Fans of Dick Tracy should enjoy this and those not familiar with the character should at least be able to learn the history of the detective throughout the years.