MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Curly Sue’ Aims for the Tear Ducts

The print ads for “Curly Sue” (citywide) feature the aggressively cute mug of a treacly moppet named Alisan Porter. Since this is a John Hughes production, we’re primed to think of “Home Alone,” but the comparison isn’t really justified.

“Home Alone,” which was directed by Chris Columbus from a Hughes script, was a Roadrunner cartoonish clonk-a-thon, though it lacked that cartoon’s rascally wit. “Curly Sue,” which was written and directed by Hughes, is intermittently knockabout, but mostly it mainlines Hughes’ Dickensian weepie mode. It’s a mode that perhaps only Charles Dickens should attempt.

Bill Dancer (Jim Belushi), a grubby con artist, and his adopted 9-year-old daughter Curly Sue (Porter), move about the country pulling scams. When Bill fakes getting hit by a car driven by an ice-water-in-her-veins divorce lawyer (Kelly Lynch), it’s not long before everybody starts mutating into kinder, gentler human beings.

The lawyer, appropriately named Grey, shucks her ruthlessly career-tracked mind-set and her obnoxious corporate lawyer boyfriend (John Getz) and gets all maternal and womanly. (In this movie’s universe, successful career women are by definition unmarried, childless, frosty.) Bill may be a scrounger but he’s no thief, and he’s no heel, either. Curly Sue has her scruples too. Spying a billfold of hundreds in Grey’s apartment, she sighs and resists temptation.

Is Hughes consciously cashing in on recession-era sentimentality, or does he just come by this sort of exploitation naturally? Although there’s a disconcerting amount of body-bashing in this PG-rated film--people get clubbed with planks, run into concrete columns, bounce off car windshields--its main energies are directed at our tear ducts.

And yet it’s hard to imagine anyone welling up at this display. Whatever its origins, the film’s enforced innocence is just too calculating. Belushi isn’t the heart-warmer he’s intended to be--he’s too stolid and dour; Porter, while not quite sugary enough to send one into insulin shock, has the kind of pipsqueak pizazz that would be best served in roadshow productions of “Annie.”

Lynch, in her pricey designer duds, looks like a sleek knockout most of the time, but she’s too good an actress to fit comfortably into this puppet show. Her face freezes into heartfelt poses of transparent phoniness. By the end of filming, her smile muscles must have ached.

‘Curly Sue’

James Belushi: Bill Dancer

Alisan Porter: Curly Sue

Kelly Lynch: Grey Ellison

A Warner Bros. presentation of a John Hughes film. Writer/producer/director Hughes. Executive producer Tarquin Gotch. Cinematographer Jeffrey Kimball. Editor Peck Prior and Harvey Rosenstock. Costumes Michael Kaplan. Music Georges Delerue. Production design Doug Kraner. Art director Steven Schwartz. Set designers Gary Baugh, William Fosser and Masako Masuda. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG.