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80This sleek and sunny comedy is an all-too-rare example of smart and inventive Hollywood filmmaking.
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The rare David Spade movie that won't make you hate yourself in the morning.
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63Manages to fascinate more than it entertains.
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60Offers a largely satisfying mix of broad slapstick, seriocomic sentimentality and mostly amusing satirical thrusts at easy targets.
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58Imparts its fair share of laughs but bogs down after a solid start and never makes anything special out of its premise.
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50Spade goes sweet and gooey. This is nucking futs.
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50There are laughs, to be sure, and some gleeful supporting performances, but after a promising start the movie sinks in a bog of sentiment.
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50After a smart start, it sinks into sentimental goo that traps even the aggressively snarky Spade.
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50The majority of Dickie Roberts winds up looking like a tame episode of the "Brady Bunch" -- spiked with Spade-esque crudity.
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50The film is intermittently funny and strangely intermittent.
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50Sharp satire or feel-good foolishness? Silly sap won out.
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50The unique musical ending is worth the wait.
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50The number of levels on which these pros trade on their diminished reputations makes the movie an inside joke rather than a funny one. If Spade thinks otherwise, he's nucking futs.
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50The movie's ridiculous good humor -- laced with just enough barbs to keep it from going soft -- suggest that it's been made with some thought and care. I often found myself laughing in spite of no one, not even myself.
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Squanders endless opportunities for sharp satire, keeping to a steady course of tame, toothless comedy, and wrapping things up with the kind of vapid ending "The Brady Bunch" would be proud to call its own.
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50The movie has been made with consummate carelessness but with occasional moments of knowing humor.
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40Generally succeeds -- in hit-and-miss fashion -- at bridging the gap between unlikable jerk and misunderstood good guy, though it's still something of a leap to leading-man territory.
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40Maintaining a winking distance from his comic persona, Mr. Spade radiates a cunning show-business cynicism that lets you know he's aware that he's slumming to make a buck.
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40Spade claims he latched onto his snide persona to distinguish himself from the pack; it's served him well as an ensemble player and a big-screen foil to Chris Farley, but as a romantic lead he's hopeless.
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38The best thing about star and co-writer David Spade's Dickie Roberts, Former Child Star is the end-title sequence, a big, sassy sing-along in which dozens of old TV child stars spew out defiant jokes about their old careers and fame's fickle fingers.
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38Whether his character is happy, sad, angry or scared, Spade affects precisely the same knowing smirk and sarcastic delivery. This one-note style makes him a funny stand-up comedian. But in a role, it's usually pure amateur hour.
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Isn't so much a movie as a 90-minute Trivial Pursuit contest to name bit players from TV's distant past.
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30Occasionally funny, cameo-speckled marshmallow.
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30Spade can still be funny when he lets himself be mean, and Dickie Roberts shows glimmers of that dynamic, but they're muscled out by lazy slapstick and maudlin stuff.
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Obtuse and creepy.
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30It underscores the gruesome legacy of Saturday Night Live in American movies...They haven't liberated screen comedy, they've left it neutered--or, should I say, Spade.
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25Four chuckles and a lively final-credits sequence are a mighty poor score for 99 minutes of alleged comedy, and the sentimental stuff is even worse.
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25There's a funny movie struggling inside of Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star. Too bad it never gets out.
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20The best bit, however, is not even in the movie, but in the film’s end credits: an expletive-filled parody of We Are the World in which a host of has-beens croon about their halcyon days as child stars.
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20When the movie's not playing stupid, it's aiming for sickly sweet sincerity. It's such a jarring and inevitably juvenile juxtaposition it comes off like a Hallmark card parody written by the staffers at "Cracked."
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20This David Spade comedy breaks an ankle, ruptures several knee ligaments and hits the dirt harder than a felled linebacker. Best thing you can do for this movie? Leave it writhing in the throes of forced humor.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 10 out of 19
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Mixed: 1 out of 19
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Negative: 8 out of 19
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Andrew9It was funny, entertaining, and still had a moral at the end... Thats what a good comedy should be.