Liam Maguren and Alex Casey (The Filminist) continue to plague their nostalgic childhood movie memories with grim reality as they revisit long-forgotten films their parents recorded on VHS. Now in their 20s, their perspectives have changed for better and for worse, as they found out re-watching Return to Oz and Space Jam.
Now they set their sights on the Macaulay Culkin mid-’90s hit Richie Rich.
ALEX: I used to have quite a romantic affiliation with Macaulay Culkin when I was younger.
LIAM: Not surprising – this movie pushed him out as a sex symbol.
There’s definite allusions to puberty and how his burgeoning sexuality is about to come out.
So Richie Rich is born into wealth and his parents are trying to teach him his first words…
All the while under a spinning mobile of money and gems.
I think they legally own the money symbol because it’s everywhere. They had dollar-shaped hedges on their lawn.
And dollar-shaped spots on their genetically modified dog.
They can afford that sort of engineering when they have super scientist Keenbean in their employment.
That guy is a damn buffoon.
He’s the huggable sweaty version of the fat asshole from Space Jam.
Is this an ongoing motif in mid-‘90s kids movies? That there is always an overweight idiot buffoon character? I feel like we don’t get that so much in kids’ films anymore. I guess we might be past fat shaming now.
We still have Melissa McCarthy playing fatty-falls-over roles in Identity Thief and Hangover III.
Those are more for ‘90s kids that haven’t moved on from fat jokes.
So Richie’s 12 now and he sees some kids playing ball…
And he’s like…
And Cadbury’s like…
These povo kids are having the best time.
Because they too are rich. Rich with friendship.
They have each other, one of every token in that baseball team…
They got ‘ginger’ and ‘girl’ all in one.
The catch-all Asian character is fat, so he’s also a double-threat. And there’s also the cool backwards-cap white guy with the Ray-bans.
Richie is back home meandering around Keenbean’s laboratory, checking out all the inventions that their money goes towards.
Like that weird machine that makes bedpans out of stuff but instead makes bowling balls.
And the impervious spray, a spray that can make things invincible, which is cool and practical. There’s also a remote control bee, which is neither cool nor practical yet they pumped millions of dollars into creating it.
Robobee – the bee that changes size at least a hundred times throughout the course of the movie…
And he also invented the sniffer.
“The Smellmaster” I believe it’s called.
Which ends up playing a vital role in the plot.
Yes, so very surprisingly. I couldn’t have imagined that any of these convoluted and weirdly specific inventions introduced the first act would appear in the film ever again…
Carl Sack from Boston Legal turns up as the bad guy…
You know he’s the bad guy because he immediately fires the chauffeur for parking too close to a puddle – unlike Richie’s dad who never fires anyone. So this guy is pure evil.
He has a weasel face.
He wants to steal everything and seems very surprised to find out that their riches are locked away in a family vault.
Cut to the next day where Richie is with Cadbury and the foreign gym instructor – this is where we see Richie start to experience puberty.
In quite a gross pervy way. When she bends over, Richie’s like…
The world was not ready for Macaulay Culkin to grow up. How old was he in this? 12?
I think so.
This was also his last soiree as a child actor. I think he disappeared after this to emerge years later with a goatee and a heroin addiction.
Richie then goes to rich school with all the other rich assholes kids.
Which is seemingly just a line of fax machines.
This was back when you had to be rich to have a fax machine. Now you have to be poor to still own one.
And potentially 75 years old.
So Richie tries to engage in baseball with the poor again by betting $10,000 that he can hit one ball.
It seems like an oversight that they are letting a child walk around with that much cash in his pockets.
He hits the ball out of the park, but the poor kids still reject him. Then, when he’s about to go to London with his Dad, his Mum is like…
And she swaps places with Richie on the trip. That’s when the snivelling bodyguard plants a bomb on the plane – this was back when the plane bomb gag was hilarious. Nobody knows about the bomb apart from snivelling weasel face and the bodyguard, who seems to be the only bodyguard in his employment.
Actually, there are some black bodyguards that appear later in the background. So shame on you.
Meanwhile, Cadbury decides to cheer Richie up by bribing the poor kids to come over to his house.
And they have the best day of all time. I love it when they turn up and the black kid says…
And the fat kid is so stoked, especially when the McDonalds doors open to show Keenbean scampering away with armfuls of cheeseburgers.
Got to wedge another fat joke in there.
There’s also the kiddi-pault. Which features some very blatantly adult stuntpeople.
And then suddenly they are at Six Flags, which is supposed to be Richie’s backyard. And you can kind of see the theme park in the background but that’s okay.
Meanwhile, back at the plane, Richie’s father uses the smellmaster to find chocolates, but discovers the plane bomb instead. He throws it out but it blows up the tail, leading to the best jump-cut ever.
Weirdly, the wife is flying the plane. She also recognises the scientific name for TNT.
So she knows how to fly a plane and the chemical properties of dynamite…
But she can’t figure out why her own child is sad…
They are about to leave and then suddenly the dickish Ray-bans kid says…
Sleazy rat.
He had the best day of his life and he’s still asking for shit.
That’s why you never help out the poor.
That’s how capitalism works.
I was wondering at this point if this was perhaps very true to life for Macaulay, saying goodbye to his friends who he had paid to hang out with him for the day. He was the highest paid and most famous child actor in the world; you’ve got to wonder what it did to him as a person. And as the future, or our present has shown, bit of a heroin addict.
Just a little bit.
He’s done just one or two heroins.
So Richie Rich is told that his parents are probably dead but he doesn’t believe them. So he calls upon his computer Xbox Kinect thing with Keenbean’s freaky CGI head in it.
Inexplicably ginger as well. And his head spins around like The Exorcist and his eyes dilate in and out. It’s a sick Keenbean-based nightmare.
Like a chubby ginger RoboCain.
So the locator keeps saying “Dad not found. Dad not found. Dad not found. Dad not found.”
Most annoying lost parent computer contraption of all time.
And weasel face then goes on to say…
This all seemingly happens within a few hours, from the report of the crash to “your parents are dead” to “I’m going to take over the company and kill you.”
No bullshitting. Then they cut to this weird sexercycle scene.
With the gross secretary who’s like “oohhh, it’s so hard…”
Richie decides to take control of his parents’ company, becoming the boss of Wall Street thanks to a montage.
A magazine cover montage. Which, again, seems to happen within a few hours. He even made “Sexiest Man Alive”, which is a weird move for a 12 year old.
Just proves that, above all else, money is sexy.
Even if it gets into paedophile territory.
Weasel face then plots to take down Cadbury and become the parental guardian of Richie.
How did they get Cadbury in jail?
They framed him by putting bomb parts under his bed.
There’s also a real dark allusion to Cadbury hanging himself. DON’T TALK ABOUT SUICIDE THIS IS A KIDS FILM.
Luckily, Richie sneaks in the acid toothpaste to get him out.
With some Latin phrase written on the card that says some crap like, “Toothpastis will getis you outis.”
He then ends up bashing a biker dude who was going to kill him.
The one guy who gets a leather du-rag in prison. Cadbury steals his clothes and looks like an absolute badass when he escapes.
He goes “Let’s kick butt” and then I wrote a joke about Cadbury being ‘The Butt-ler’.
Now they’re in ginger girl’s house and use her computer which implies that she really isn’t that poor. They somehow access Richie’s Xbox Kinect from there.
Meanwhile, Dad finds his razor on the life raft that he uses to make some very weird GPS electrical circuit in order to be rescued.
They also find the survival kit filled with chardonnay, Perrier and caviar.
And the wife finds her Louis Vuitton trunk which helpfully only has dresses in it.
As well as her whole identity.
So from the poor kid’s computer, they find Dad.
And somehow weasel face discovers CG Keenbean and goes off to find Richie’s dad after torturing RL Keenbean by tying him up and placing a chicken sandwich just out of his reach.
Richie and the povo kids raid the Rich mansion, hurtling manure at the guards outside the house.
At this point I wrote: “why has nobody called the police?” Seems weird that Diane as the adult isn’t getting directly involved but is watching from miles away in this highly dangerous sort of hostage situation.
It basically turns into Red Dawn. But then they get captured, and the guard who got shat on takes the fat kid’s twinkie.
Then, weasel face forces the parents to sing their weird musical vault password while his henchman cages the children in Keenbean’s lab. After this point, I felt there were far too many instances of pointing guns at kids’ heads.
Especially right after that sweet bit where they reveal the vault was actually full of family trinkets that reminded them of Richie.
That vault was full of crap really – like a sombrero and shit.
So weasel face is unimpressed and what’s to shoot everyone.
That’s when he shoots at Richie.
Many, many times. It’s really quite shocking.
None in the head, thank god.
Also thank god that Richie was wearing the impervious spray that saved his life. Weasel face starts to say “shit” a lot as this point. Is that kosher?
I didn’t even notice.
He does on that big scene on Mt Richmore.
Which was foreshadowed.
They did the Mt Richmore scene really well.
I agree; they did their own thing with it by adding the one thing that makes any scene better.
There’s also a switchblade scene with the grey haired security guard. Again, on the cusp of very extreme violence.
It was like the music video for Beat It. Cadbury was definitely dressed the part.
Great segue there to the Michael Jackson reference when the mom’s nose gets lasered off Mt Richmore. This is a scene of grave danger where her whole family could potentially die and all she is worried about is her statue’s nose…
I did wonder about the Michael Jackson line and if at the time Macaulay was uncomfortable with them mocking his best and only friend.
I think that line ended their friendship and forced him into heroin.
Classic fall from grace.
So they defeat the bad guy and we see Richie playing baseball in his backyard where weasel face is doing community service in his garden.
Seems like bad form to have attempted murderers do community service around the child victim.
It’s worth noting that Macaulay got $8,000,000 for this role and $8,000,000 for ‘Getting Even With Dad’ in the same year. So basically Macaulay Culkin is Richie Rich. And Richie Rich is all set to become a heroin addict, who my friend once saw eating snails on his own in Paris.
I want that sequel.
