Curly Sue

Look out everybody! The world's smallest con artist is in town

CURLY SUE (PG)

D: John Hughes

Warner Bros. (John Hughes)

USA 🇺🇸 1991

101 mins

Comedy

W: John Hughes

DP: Jeffrey Kimball

Ed: Peck Prior & Harvey Rosenstock

Mus: Georges Delerue

James Belushi (Bill Dancer), Kelly Lynch (Grey Ellison), Alisan Porter (Curly Sue), John Getz (Walker McCormick)

Throughout the 1980's, John Hughes' movies mostly concerned teenage characters in high school with various adventures and dilemmas.

Come 1990, Hughes seemed to only be interested in making films about younger, more precocious people, which worked well in Home Alone, but not so much here.

Curly Sue is a grotesquely schmaltzy comedy about a con man and his 9-year-old orphan accomplice who win the heart of a successful woman lawyer. The film is so contrived and manipulative that it comes off only as turgid tosh, not helped by a horrible performance by its juvenile star. Shirley Temple may have got away with this sort of thing in the 1930's, even Tatum O'Neal in 1973, but Alisan Porter in 1991, no way sucker!

4/10

Alisan Porter & James Belushi in Curly Sue