The Movie: Dick Tracy serves up plenty of eye candy in its fantastic comic book inspired color scheme and wonderfully detailed makeup and costume work. The many villains are played by some pretty big names in Hollywood. Besides the stars of the show, Warren Beatty, Al Pacino and Madonna (wearing some very slinky dresses, I might add), you have quite a list of big names playing minor characters, including Dustin Hoffman, James Caan, Dick Van Dyke, Paul Sorvino, Kathy Bates and Colm Meaney (Cheif O'Brien!). And surrounding it all is an original score by Danny Elfman, and some original songs by musical theater giant Stephen Sondheim.

But despite the wonderful talent involved, Dick Tracy proves to be full of sensory pleasures, but lacking in plot. Though it isn't entirely boring, it's a very sparse generic film noir type "cop goes after the mobsters and tries to keep his personal life straight" plot that never really builds up any serious momentum or draws you in to the world of the story. The story is really nothing more than a framework around which the amazing visual aspects of the film could be built.

Is it a bad movie? Not exactly, but if it weren't for all of the interesting visual elements, it probably would be. So check it out if eye candy is what you're looking for, just don't come hunting for a riveting mob drama.

The DVD: This disc surprised me in a good way by including a DTS soundtrack, but it also surprised me in a bad way by having absolutely no special features, not even a simple trailer. The video transfer was more than decent, with the many bright, bold colors of the film nearly jumping off the screen, but it showed a certain softness to the picture that wiped out some of the detail.

The audio was something of a mixed bag -- the score by Danny Elfman came through with amazing sparkling clarity that the dialog and sound effects couldn't quite compete with, but overall very decent. My only real complaint about it is the relative lack of surround encoding where it could have been used to enhance the story a bit.

And as I mentioned earlier, there are no special features, this is strictly a movie-only release.