"Richie Rich" is such a trifle it's difficult to work up much of a head of steam to denounce it. One wishes, instead, that it would just crawl away in some obscure hole and expire without drama.
The fault, oddly enough, has little to do with Macaulay Culkin, who in about six months has gone from being world's cutest boy to world's most despicable human. But Culkin is by far the least of its problems and the most professional member of a cast that by and large does nothing to distinguish itself. Culkin is cute and chipper, he doesn't run into the furniture or forget his lines. Whether he's charismatic enough to compel the vehicle is a question of complete irrelevance; the vehicle itself is completely uncompellable.
Derived from a not-very-interesting '50s comic book, the movie pushes along well-trod paths. Richie is the world's richest teen-ager, but, of course, he just wants to be a regular kid, and is always trying to get into games of baseball with the ragamuffins outside the Tool and Die Plant that his father -- played by Edward Herrman, who specializes in upper-class twittery -- has just bought. Of course the kids misjudge him -- possibly it's his snooty English butler Cadbury hovering over his shoulder -- and won't let him play.
Of course, he wins them over, butler and all, and enlists them as commandos in a somewhat dim plot to regain control of his father's corporate empire, which has been seized by a villainous John Larroquette. The shenanigans are on a level with the more mundane kid-movies of our time: "The Little Rascals," "Dennis the Menace" and so forth.
Generally the movie is lame: No one involved seems to believe in it very much and it sputters along at the just barely watchable level through gags that even the dimmest member of the audience will see coming miles in advance. Nobody is any good: Herrman has been giving this same performance since the Year One, Christine Ebersole as the dotty mom grows truly irritating and Jonathan Hyde, as Cadbury, does nothing to suggest that the role of the English butler can be anything other than the rankest cliche.
Two oddities compel some attention. The first is how benevolent a view of "the rich" this movie contains -- a clear, anachronistic relic of the '50s. The rich are not the raptors of the liberal imagination or the heroes of the conservative: rather, they're like a tribe of likable, if undisciplined children; if only they can be shown the error of their ways, their natural humanism will reassert control of their rambunctious selves. Thus the bad guy in "Richie Rich" isn't rich old Dad, with his billions, but embittered wage slave Larroquette, who's worked out a trick to get them from him.
The second weirdness is the movie's climax, which turns out to be an elaborate parody of Hitchcock's "North by Northwest," with the Riches and their persecutors scampering over building-scaled faces etched into the side of a mountain, exactly as Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason did so many years ago. Like, is anybody under the age of 10 going to notice and is anybody over the age of 10 going to care? It seems like director Daniel Petrie may be suffering from an egomania as big as all outdoors. Or perhaps it's the only way he knew anybody would ever write a movie review that contained both the words "Petrie" and "Hitchcock."
I should add that the movie comes complete with a new Chuck Jones-directed Road Runner cartoon, the first in some 30 years. Beep-beep. It's very funny, if several notches below the classic Road Runner canon of the '60s.
"RICHIE RICH"
Starring: Macaulay Culkin and John Larroquette
Director: Daniel Petrie
Released by: Warner Bros.
Rating: PG
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