Earlier on Friday, we told you about Warren Beatty's vague proposal to make "another" Dick Tracy film, presumably a sequel to the 1990 blockbuster that featured Warren Beatty, Madonna, and a terrifyingly fishy Al Pacino. The idea provokes several questions: Will Beatty still star? Will any of the original stars return? Will the movie fit comfortably alongside the dark, dystopian flair of the newer Batman films? And most of all: Who most deserves to play Dick Tracy? We're picking our five most ideal choices to play the slickster in the slicker, and they're all worthy of Breathless Mahoney's smolder.
No offense to Mr. Beatty, but a 74-year-old Dick Tracy doesn't strike me as a prime cineplex draw. You'd have to slow the finesse of the original film down to the speed of, say, Gene Wilder in A&E's 1999 detective story Murder in a Small Town. Old detectives are for cable, Warren! Still, Shirley MacLaine's brother is a fine actor, and it'd be refreshing to see him return to the big screen after a ten-year absence.
Face it: If Ben Affleck could pick a single most ideal role for himself, he'd pick Dick Tracy. Shadowy grit speaks to Ben Affleck as an auteur, no? Add a few street lamps and a Johnny Eager-style noir glaze to The Town, and he'd have a Dick Tracy revamp. I support any effort to redeem the comic book cataclysm of Daredevil.
Hans Landa is just about the foxiest 54-year-old in the movies today, and since Mr. Beatty was 53 when the first Dick Tracy was released, the sequel could act as a more immediate follow-up to the first outing.
We all remember Batman and Robin and how sorry it made us, but I can't quite dismiss the notion of Dr. Doug Ross as a hard-boiled comic protagonist. It just works! The role of Dick Tracy requires a certain elan with pulpy dialogue, and Clooney's Ocean's Eleven cred is résumé enough to fill Beatty's clacking shoes.
Was there any doubt? Hamm fits the profile, brow-line, and cool of Dick Tracy, not to mention the affinity for a debonair wardrobe. He's almost twice as appropriate for a Dick Tracy reboot than for Superman. The Dick Whitman/Dick Tracy parallels line up like dominoes, and I'd pay to see Hamm sidestep his budding career as a comic film actor for this role. While we're at it, we should cast his Mad Men colleague Christina Hendricks in a Brenda Starr reboot. Talk about a film that definitely deserves a second attempt.
[Photos: Getty Images]