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Movie Reviews

Dickie Roberts

David Spade Typecast As Another Smarmy, Smug, Smart Aleck

David Spade has had quite a career on the boob tube. Fame came to the diminutive wisecracker on Saturday Night Live, where he was one of the ensemble players from 1990 until 1996.

The following year, he parlayed that success into his own sitcom, NBC’s Just Shoot Me. He has also made several guest appearances on other TV series and award shows, invariably positioning himself as that flip, “above-it-all” bad boy who's "too cool for the room."

Regrettably, that magic has failed to translate to the big screen, where Spade’s brand of comedy tends to come off as more irritating than irreverent.

As a result, his track record reveals an unending string of forgettable flops, including Tommy Boy (1995), Black Sheep (1996), 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag (1997), Senseless (1998), Lost & Found (1999), Loser (2000) and Joe Dirt (2001). And although he’s yet to be seen in a bona fide, box office hit, for some reason, Hollywood never tires of deeming him worthy of another wise-guy vehicle.

Spade’s latest outing in the title role as Dickie Roberts has got to be his lousiest yet. The premise has him playing a once beloved child TV star, long languishing in obscurity since the cancellation of his popular sitcom, who is now desperate for another shot at fame.

He meets with sympathetic director Rob Reiner, who agrees to consider casting Dickie in his next project, provided he agrees to live for a month with an average family in order to experience the normal home life he missed out on as a child celebrity.

Though the set-up certainly sounds promising enough, the plot is ever so artlessly-executed by hack, Hollywood director Sam Weisman, the man responsible for the absolutely awful What’s the Worst That Could Happen (2001). (By the way, this movie, along with the putrid 1999 remake of The Out-of-Towners, made my “10 Worst List for 2001.”)

Still, Spade must shoulder some of the blame as well, as he claims a co-writing credit.

Dickie Roberts really amounts to little more than an adolescent indulgence in scatology and misogyny typical of today’s ‘teensploitation’ genre. What’s worse, it arrives heavily layered with incestuous and pedophilic overtones.

I must admit to being a bit surprised that the film landed a PG-13 rating. Instead of the theme of recapturing a lost childhood, the film focuses on Dickie’s earnest efforts to ruin the innocence of his adopted pre-teen brother and sister.

He moves in with the Tracys, an ideal family of four who lives in a big suburban house, complete with a white picket fence. We are supposed to find it cute when Dickie arrives and ruins the happy home.

He sleeps in the same room as the children and teaches them how to use the “b” and “s” words. He informs the brother that his Mom is "really hot" and asks him whether or not he is attracted to her, if she wears a g-string, and if her breasts are real or implants. Later, Dickie flirts with Mom, imploring her to take her top off.

His behavior with his “sister” is equally inappropriate. For instance, he accompanies her to cheerleading practice where he ogles another nine year-old and calls her a slut, ostensibly because she's wearing a T-shirt advertising a popular porno magazine. Ultimately, in one of the weirdest plot contrivances ever, Dad conveniently abandons the family and the sex-obsessed Dickie ends up in bed with the mother.

In short, Dickie Roberts has nothing of value to offer other than a dizzying number of cameo appearances by former child stars, each of them being only momentarily amusing as a voyeuristic opportunity to compare the grown-up on screen to the kid still emblazoned on our mind's eye. I won't recite a laundry list of the ex-celebs among the cast, since spotting and identifying them is the only fun that was to be had during this stupefying 99-minute endurance test. This is cinema for degenerates.

Poor (0 soup bowls)
Rated PG-13 for crude / sex-related humor/ profanity / drug references.

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