The 1990s was the decade of the child actor, and its quintessential star was Macaulay Culkin. From a very young age, Culkin performed alongside some of Hollywood's biggest names, including Tim Robins, Katherine O'Hara, Ted Danson, John Candy, and Joe Pesci. While no film in his young career matched the explosive success of Home Alone, he made big movie studios waterfalls of cash on multiple projects, and this put him in the unique position to star in several films clearly tailored to his unique magnetism. These phenomena coalesced into the final film of his early career, 1994's Richie Rich. In this Warner Brothers Family Entertainment picture, Culkin plays the role of a wealthy heir to a mega-corporation who has to battle evil conspirators bent on his killing his family and gaining control of their enormous resources.
Culkin was no stranger to family films with themes about money and criminality by the time he filmed Richie Rich. In the previous year, he worked on Getting Even with Dad with Ted Danson, in which he plays a character who forces his father to choose between family and a bag of stolen coins potentially worth millions. While not as explicitly themed as Getting Even with Dad, two projects Culkin filmed with John Hughes, Home Alone and Uncle Buck, also explore themes about wealth and criminality. It's important to note that these films don't depict all wealth as immoral, just illegitimately earned wealth. It's criminality that is the true evil, which is an omnipresent theme from that time.
Richie Rich distills the theme of the wealthy being good and the criminals being the true evil into its most obvious and frank form. The Richs are portrayed as morally upstanding corporate citizens who look out for the working man, and the villains are conniving, scheming sociopaths. In the film's first act, Richard Rich, played by Edward Herrman, gives a short speech to his company's board of directors saying, "I've never fired a man, and I'm not about to start now." Richie inherits similar values, empathizing with the families in one of the company's factories and doing everything he can to save their jobs. The core conflict of the film has Richie protecting his own wealth while simultaneously protecting his friends from physical harm and their families from financial loss, literally tieing the well-being of working-class people to the righteous rich.
John Laroquette plays the main villain in Richie Rich as the vaguely European, too lazy to even be called a pun, executive named Laurance Van Dough. He devises a plan to kill the Rich family and steal their wealth, which he believes is contained in a giant vault within Rich Manor. Of course, Richard Rich's technical prowess and extreme competence, along with some help from his son, allow him to foil the plan. Ultimately, Van Dough falls to his death from a precipice on Mount Richmore after trying to kill the Riches yet again and failing. Yes, the good guys here are the ones carving their faces into the side of a mountain.
Richie Rich was a moderate success a the box office and a big money maker in the VHS rental and sales market. Critically, however, the film received poor ratings from critics, with a few exceptions. The action and conflict between the villains and Richie aren't particularly fun, although there are some set pieces in the mansion that work to build some tense moments. The biggest problem with the movie is its moral themes, which are sort of nauseating even for an American public that is used to being fed propaganda about the virtue of rich people on a regular basis.
Ideally, Richie Rich would have been best if it stuck its main strength: the fantasy of being a rich kid. Without the stupid villains, we could get more awesome moments like eating at a Mcdonalds' in our house, riding our own roller coaster, racing carts in the backyard, playing baseball with butlers, shooting a giant laser, and conversing with our own private scientist. The film certainly has many of these fantasies, but I wish it would have gone bigger with them. Instead, we have to sit through a derivative tale about how it's wrong to take money that is not yours.
