Movie Review: Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star
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What Parents Should Know
You'll want to note the "13" in the PG-13 rating--there's
lots of stuff here that you won't want your tween seeing or
repeating. The movie contains very strong language for a PG-13,
including crude humor, alcohol and drug references, and a joke
about Jesus that some people may find offensive.
Families who see this movie could talk about some of their favorite child stars and what they would and would not like about being famous.
Common Sense Media Review
"Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star" just isn't a very funny
movie. At best, audiences who don't think too much will laugh
once or twice then forget the whole thing before they reach the
door of the theater.
This is yet another in the increasingly inert and generic assembly line created by Adam Sandler for SNL alums like Rob Schneider. It has Sandler's "Happy Madison" production company trademarks: lame middle-school-style jokes that seem racy to younger kids and stuck-in-the-80's humor for older viewers who, like Sandler, suffer from arrested development.
The SNL-alum of choice in this one is David Spade as a former child star trying to make a comeback. But it fails to take advantage of Spade's snarky sensibility, relying mostly on the stunt casting of real-life faded child stars to make the audience feel smugly superior to the people who were once featured on their lunch boxes and locker posters.
Dickie Roberts was the son of an overbearing mother who pushed him to be the child star of a hugely successful TV show called The Glimmer Gang, complete with a precious tagline ("This is nucking futs!"-cute, huh?) that propelled him into stardom and had him washed up by the time he was seven. Now he's fighting to get back in the picture, starting with a pitiful celebrity boxing match where he gets his butt kicked by "Webster" (Emmanuel Lewis).
Dickie begs director Rob Reiner to cast him in a role that Sean Penn is competing for about a guy building a big house who finds Heaven in his backyard.
When Reiner tells Dickie that he's unsuitable for the part because he has no idea of what it's like to have a normal childhood, Dickie puts an ad in the paper to find a family that will let him move into their house and live like a kid, as one character says, to "reboot him like a computer."
He's adopted by the father (Craig Bierko) of a picturesque American family. Mommy (Mary McCormack) and the two kids (Scott Terra and Jenna Boyd) don't really like him at first, but... you know the rest.
Of course the premise makes no sense, but then the way it's carried out doesn't make any sense either. It's just a string of listless skits. The movie feels haphazard and thrown together, with a bike-riding scene that ends up like a Jackass stunt and a disturbingly Oedipal "your mom's hot" running joke. Just to show how lazy this film is, when Dickie gets back on the scene, instead of writing something funny, they use use old footage of David Spade on Jay Leno's show, on the cover of Rolling Stone, and performing with Aerosmith. Or maybe that was in hopes of reminding us that despite this movie, David Spade is actually a pretty cool guy.
