Curly Sue

John Hughes seems to be losing some of his magic. Oh sure, all he needs is one history-making blockbuster like Home Alone every once in a while in order to maintain his cachet. But how many of these Curly Sues and Career Opportunities and Dutchs must one man create before the world realizes that this filmmaker is no golden boy? More than should be necessary is my answer. Anyway, here we've got Curly Sue, the story of a “father and daughter” grifter team (Belushi and Porter) taken in by an emotionless yuppie lawyer (Lynch). The plot's pretty thin and thoroughly predictable. So what's left is character depiction, but that approach only works if the audience becomes involved enough to care about the characters' fates. And here's what we've got to work with: a petty con artist with minimal survival skills and a skewed sense of ethics, a shallow stereotype of a heartless and wealthy attorney and a smartass child with Shirley Temple curls. Not a group likely to win audience popularity contests. That this script works at all is a tribute to these performers. It's hard to say, following his last star pairing with a mutt in K-9, whether Belushi's star turn with an unknown child actress is a step up or a step down. Porter's not bad as the Shirley Temple of the 1990s, but it's a phenomenon I do not understand even one little bit. But Lynch's performance is pleasurable to watch, proving that her gritty turn as Matt Dillon's junkie wife in Drugstore Cowboy was no one-shot fluke and that she's more than just another pretty-faced model turned actress. This, however, is the heart of what I don't understand about Curly Sue (or Home Alone or virtually any of Hughes' recent movies). These movies are family entertainments, popular with young and old alike. But the family lives they depict form a simmering nexus of intergenerational hurt, dyspepsia and disappointment. It's like Hughes is creating Grimm fairy tales for TV babies.