AllMovie

Much like the typical child actor, Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star starts off with loads of promise, then becomes a has-been. For about the first 30 minutes, the viewer is awash in the fresh comedic potential of a protagonist we've never quite seen: a crash-and-burn sitcom kid whose ungraceful years become tabloid fodder, and that's if he's lucky. There's something timely and incisive to Dickie's opening scenes participating in a celebrity boxing match, in which he gets pummeled by the diminutive Emmanuel Lewis. Transition that to a poker game featuring Leif Garrett, Danny Bonaduce, and the like -- who really do need this exposure -- and you've got the ingredients for a self-aware satire on the business and its more pathetic casualties. And David Spade is the right guy to carry off the familiar role of a bratty pipsqueak, certainly looking the part of a former cute kid turned into an ungainly adult. It's when Spade sets aside his caustic instincts, making over his character as a husband figure to Mary McCormack and a father figure to her kids, that the movie belly flops worse than Spade on a Slip 'n Slide without any water. This is just one of many cutesy scenes with the children, which quickly dominate the running time at the expense of the sharply observed Hollywood insider bits. Spade should care more about the exquisite desperation of this character than his domestic salvation, so even though Jenna Boyd and Scott Tessa are terrific as the kids, they belong in a movie with a different agenda. If it does happen to be co-writer Spade's agenda to make a sentimental "look what I learned" redemption movie, then he's done a good job.