Dick Tracy (1990)

More than Batman or Superman, Warren Beatty's bid to ace the summer-movie sweepstakes has been fashioned as a live-action comic strip — a lavishly eye-popping Day-Glo gangster movie. Beatty and his team of collaborators have heightened the vibrantly tawdry urban nightworld of Chester Gould's classic comic strip: It's as if a '30s crime-wave melodrama had been colorized by Andy Warhol. As an exercise in American pop surrealism, the picture succeeds brilliantly, yet it also feels thin and dissociated. Beatty plays the hard-boiled Tracy as a charming, polite nothing, a Clark Kent with no Superman inside him. Overall, Dick Tracy could have used a little less color and a little more flesh and blood.