CURLY SUE is sweet and heartwarming, but will give you tooth decay and the warming of the heart may be due to indigestion.
Bill Dancer (Jim Belushi, TV’s LIFE WITH JIM) is a homeless con man who uses the little girl Curly Sue (Alisan Porter, PARENTHOOD) to help him scrounge up a meal and a few bucks wherever they can. One day they scam a high-powered New York lawyer named Grey Ellison (Kelly Lynch, DRUGSTORE COWBOY) by pretending that she hit Bill with her car. Due to the intervention of her jerky boyfriend Walker McCormick (John Getz, MEN AT WORK), Bill and Sue only get a meal. Then guess what happens? Come on guess. Grey ends up hitting Bill with the car for real and takes him and Curly Sue into her home.
Come on guess what happens next? Come on guess. I’m pretty sure you could guess exactly what happens throughout the rest of the film. The film is strictly sentimental paint-by-numbers movie making. Where the movie really fails is in its stupid jokes. The moment that really spelled doom for me was when all nicely dressed, Bill and Sue meet up with a snobby maitre d’ (Cameron Thor, A FEW GOOD MEN), who Grey is clearly acquainted with, that treated them poorly in the past. The maitre d’ is every embarrassed and the film plays on our sympathies and then Bill slugs the guy in the face twice. This is not funny. This action is just a joke for the film and means nothing. Grey makes no comment, doesn’t care. This is the overall problem with the film. It wants to deal with “issues,” but it wants to water them down, which makes everything too easy and ultimately too false for my tastes.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
