This 1991 release was written, directed, and produced by the late John Hughes, who would continue to write and produce for movies after this, but would never direct again. I knew this was one of his films, which was how I discovered it in the first place, so I decided to watch it, but wasn't expecting it to live up to most of his more popular works from the eighties. "Curly Sue" seems to be pretty obscure compared to many other Hughes films, and I noticed a mediocre rating here, so as much as I've been impressed with most of the other efforts I've seen from the filmmaker, it wouldn't have surprised me if I had found this particular one to be consistently boring throughout. It did look like that for a while, but eventually, that changed a bit.
Curly Sue is an orphaned young girl who has been taken care of by a homeless man named Bill Dancer since she was an infant. Together, these two survive by going around and scamming people in order to get food. They scam Grey Ellison, a rich lawyer, by making it look like she has just hit Bill with her car in a parking lot. They get a meal from her, but that wasn't as much as they were expecting. However, very shortly after this scam, Curly Sue and Bill meet Grey again, and this time, she accidentally ends up hitting Bill with her car for real! The lawyer then takes the two of them to her luxurious apartment, thinking they are biologically father and daughter, and they get to stay there for the night, even though her snobbish boyfriend, Walker McCormick, does not approve of this. Curly Sue and Bill find their lives changing as Grey lets them stay in her apartment, but are still headed for some complications.
This movie is a dramedy, which means it has both humour and serious moments. For the most part, the humour doesn't work so well. Some parts did amuse me, such as the "she was too pretty" segment, but I usually kept a straight face during the film. Some parts around the beginning may have put a puzzled look on my face, such as the part where Bill gets Curly Sue to bash him over the head and she sends him flying through the air! Pretty much everything near the beginning, whether it was supposed to be funny or serious, failed to impress me. However, I eventually started finding much of "Curly Sue" to be fairly gripping, thanks to the drama in the film, though the humour continues to fail, and there may be some tedious segments, especially the movie theatre one. I did not care for the overacting of John Getz as Walker McCormick, but most of the cast performances are at least reasonable. At first, it looked like I was really going to dislike the Grey Ellison character, played by Kelly Lynch, with the scenes showing her on the job, but I found that this character soon changes.
John Hughes certainly could have ended his directing career with a better film than this, but if you ask me, this one isn't as bad as its reputation may suggest. Yes, the humour is usually lacklustre, and the filmmaker was well known for the humour in his movies, plus people have also considered "Curly Sue" to be excessively sentimental and clichéd, and I can understand that, but personally, I still found it heartwarming enough to give it an above average rating. If you watch this result of Hughes' final stint as a director, which came eighteen years before his premature death caused by a heart attack, and expect it to be up there with "The Breakfast Club", "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", "Planes, Trains & Automobiles", etc., you could very easily be disappointed. This is a different idea than any of those movies, and wasn't done as well, but while I think it's far from great (unlike some people), I guess it is at least slightly underrated.
Curly Sue is an orphaned young girl who has been taken care of by a homeless man named Bill Dancer since she was an infant. Together, these two survive by going around and scamming people in order to get food. They scam Grey Ellison, a rich lawyer, by making it look like she has just hit Bill with her car in a parking lot. They get a meal from her, but that wasn't as much as they were expecting. However, very shortly after this scam, Curly Sue and Bill meet Grey again, and this time, she accidentally ends up hitting Bill with her car for real! The lawyer then takes the two of them to her luxurious apartment, thinking they are biologically father and daughter, and they get to stay there for the night, even though her snobbish boyfriend, Walker McCormick, does not approve of this. Curly Sue and Bill find their lives changing as Grey lets them stay in her apartment, but are still headed for some complications.
This movie is a dramedy, which means it has both humour and serious moments. For the most part, the humour doesn't work so well. Some parts did amuse me, such as the "she was too pretty" segment, but I usually kept a straight face during the film. Some parts around the beginning may have put a puzzled look on my face, such as the part where Bill gets Curly Sue to bash him over the head and she sends him flying through the air! Pretty much everything near the beginning, whether it was supposed to be funny or serious, failed to impress me. However, I eventually started finding much of "Curly Sue" to be fairly gripping, thanks to the drama in the film, though the humour continues to fail, and there may be some tedious segments, especially the movie theatre one. I did not care for the overacting of John Getz as Walker McCormick, but most of the cast performances are at least reasonable. At first, it looked like I was really going to dislike the Grey Ellison character, played by Kelly Lynch, with the scenes showing her on the job, but I found that this character soon changes.
John Hughes certainly could have ended his directing career with a better film than this, but if you ask me, this one isn't as bad as its reputation may suggest. Yes, the humour is usually lacklustre, and the filmmaker was well known for the humour in his movies, plus people have also considered "Curly Sue" to be excessively sentimental and clichéd, and I can understand that, but personally, I still found it heartwarming enough to give it an above average rating. If you watch this result of Hughes' final stint as a director, which came eighteen years before his premature death caused by a heart attack, and expect it to be up there with "The Breakfast Club", "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", "Planes, Trains & Automobiles", etc., you could very easily be disappointed. This is a different idea than any of those movies, and wasn't done as well, but while I think it's far from great (unlike some people), I guess it is at least slightly underrated.