Hi, it’s your good pal B.U.R.L. - Badly Underpaid
Reviewer Lad! Ha ha! I’m here to review a kiddie sci-fi picture from the 1980s
which you may or may not remember: D.A.R.Y.L.!
It’s the sort of movie that wants to be E.T.
or WarGames, but would probably
settle for being Short Circuit or Flight of the Navigator, and doesn’t
even manage that! As 80s kidventure pictures go, it’s pretty dry – it tastes
like a mouthful of wicker!
It does open with a car chase, however!
Actually it’s a car being chased by a helicopter, and the car soon goes off a
cliff, but not before depositing a young, brown-haired boy, D.A.R.Y.L.! D.A.R.Y.L.
is soon picked up by the Barkington Youth Center, and he just as quickly
becomes the foster child of Barkington residents Mary Beth Hurt and Michael
McKean! With his unmatchable manners, his ability to hit home runs, and his
thrilling aptitude at Pole Position, D.A.R.Y.L. is soon the toast of Barkington!
No, D.A.R.Y.L. is someone the good people of Barkington will not soon forget!
But of course D.A.R.Y.L. is no ordinary
moppet! Ha ha, his name’s an acronym for starters, and then there’s that
computer in his head! The movie is a bit vague on what sort of robot he is - is
he a Terminator, a Roy Batty, a Bishop, a Data? - but he’s a robot of some
kind, and when his new family and real-boy best friend Turtle eventually find
this out it hardly even makes them blink! Such are D.A.R.Y.L.’s powers of
ingratiation!
D.A.R.Y.L. was created by laboratory scientists
because for some reason the Pentagon wanted to create armies of polite little
boys who excel at video games! The scientists, in the guise of D.A.R.Y.L.’s
real parents, take the artificial lad away from his foster parents, which makes
everyone sad, but the main scientist, played by Josef Somer of Target, quickly decides
that he has become a real boy after all, and, like his colleague at the
beginning of the movie, smuggles the lad out of the research facility and
absconds with him! A ludicrously trigger-happy cop puts an end to this
relationship (the most touching of the film), but D.A.R.Y.L. simply steals
America’s most sophisticated fighter jet and flies home to Barkington!
Oh, this movie! I wish the darn thing was
better, because it had some potential! But the direction, I’m sorry to say,
lacks any style at all, and barely any pep! There’s one car stunt and a lab set
that briefly hit the mark, but that’s about it! The performances are pretty
lifeless, with the actor playing D.A.R.Y.L. conveying D.A.R.Y.L.’s uncertainty
about human ways by wearing a constant expression of imbecilic bewilderment! It
feels like chunks were cut out because the scriptwriters could not figure out
how to deliver narrative points in an efficient way! (In this it resembles
contemporaneous Paramount product like Blue City and Summer Rental, and helps
undercut the studio’s mid-80s reputation as a slick and ruthlessly efficient
entertainment factory!)
If it’s supposed to be Pinocchio, they left out all the traumatic temptation and
lesson-learning undergone by the wooden lad, and whatever blue fairy is meant
to hasten D.A.R.Y.L.’s transformation to a real boy is here left offscreen! There
also seems to be a great deal of geographical confusion: is Barkington in the
Pacific Northwest, or maybe is it in Florida? Ha ha, there’s evidence to
suggest both! (In fact, much of it was shot in the U.K.!) It’s always nice to
see an 80s movie with the military-industrial complex portrayed as the
unalloyed baddies they are, though, but this bright spot alone is not enough
for me to give D.A.R.Y.L. anything
more than one round of Pole Position!
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