Richie Rich (film)

That's no way to treat another human being, you rich asshole.

Richie Rich (sometimes stylized Ri¢hie Ri¢h) is a live-action children's movie from 1994. The movie is renown for starring Macaulay Culkin as Richie Rich, a Donald Trump-like rich asshole who gets shot multiple times in the chest at point blank range in front of his horrified, screaming parents during the movie's climax. It is also well known for its incredible use of the "Plucky group of friends" film technique, and having a baseball game at the end of the movie that doesn't make any sense.

Synopsis

Money Buys Things

Richie Rich is very rich. He does your typical rich kid stuff: riding on his personal roller coaster, being pampered by his personal buttler, personally crying himself to sleep at night thanks to his complete lack of friends. A movie watcher could almost feel sorry for him if he wasn't such a rich, insufferable bastard. In the first scene in which Richie tries to make friends, he kicks a group of plucky poor kids playing baseball in a sandlot, telling them how much better he is than them. When they pitch the ball to him, he hits it through someone's window, and loses the baseball. He then walks away with his butler, laughing. The poor kids are left trying to scrape together enough money to fix the window.

Richie's father, rich Richard Rich, is the family chessewinner. Richard keeps a busy, son-based schedule throughout the year. He does whatever he can for Richie, spends as much time with him as possible, and builds a radar system so that Richie could find him when he wasn't around. Richard owns several companies around the world, and sits at the head of Rich Industries. Richard believes that workers who have job security are happy and efficient, and therefor has never fired a single person. The only person he has ever considered firing is Laurence Van Dough, a man Richard doesn't trust. To show this mistrust, Richard names Van Dough the company's CFO, and the one who would benefit the most should any mysterious accident happen to befall the entire Rich Family all of a sudden.

The Gold Thickens

A shocking surprise.

Richard and his family get invited to meet with the Queen of England to talk about rich-people stuff one weekend. He intends to take his entire family, but the young Richie backs out at the last minute. He stays with his butler and plots to invite the plucky group of friends to his mansion. The butler, knowing the plucky kids won't show up without an incentive, pays them to play with the Rich kid. Quickly, the kids realize that being rich gets you a lot of toys, and they learn to somehow have a little fun that day. Kids are catapulted, roller coasters are ridden, ATVs are played on, and McDonalds is had for everyone. For the first time in his life, Richie makes real friends who were really paid to be there!!!

Unfortunately, in a shocking surprise, Laugrence Van Dough, the guy everyone expects to do something crazy like plant a bomb in his parent's plane or something, secretly plants a bomb on his parent's plane, they are lost at sea and presumed dead. :(

Richie, not one to take his parent's assumed death with a heavy, gold-encrusted heart, decides not to mourn, but instead take this as an opportunity to have his friends over every day, go over Laurence Van Dough's head and take over his father's multi-billion-dollar company. Because, seriously, who is going to tell the wealthiest kid in the world "no?" To combat Richie's takeover, Van Dough comes up with a brilliant plan to take the company for himself. He finds the Rich parents out on the open ocean with only a few scant days remaining before they pass on from dehydration and heat stroke, taking with them any evidence of Van Dough's wrongdoings. Needless to say, he rescues the half-dead richers, and kidnaps them back to their own mansion, with the intention of making them all-dead slightly later. Brilliant.

A Sterling Climax

Richie, realizing his babyshitters and buttmen are back at his mansion, hatches a plot that could fool only the dumbest of henchmen. Using only the most tender, plucky group of friends as the "Meat Shield" part of the plot, Richie uses kids to cause a diversion from the armed, hostile, and generally crazed men that Van Dough has hired to protect the mansion, knowing that most of them will probably survive. Needless to say it all works out, with the only hiccup being that one time all of them were nearly dissolved into an amoebic pile of goo. Richie uses this time to find his parents being held up in the family vault by Van Dough. He outsmarts the villain and thankfully saves his family's money. His family is also saved.

The part where Richie is shot in the chest

Shockingly, the internet doesn't have any images of Richie being shot. We will have to settle instead for this, an example of why he should have been shot.

“Cool!”

~ Richie Rich on getting shot multiple times in the chest from point blank range in front of his horrified, screaming parents

So around the time his friends are almost liquified Richie sets out to save his parents, who are being held hostage by Van Dough. Van Dough successfully coerces the Rich parents into opening the family vault, but is horrified to find that instead of money, which Richard explains is kept in banks, the Rich's vault holds worthless family keepsakes. An enraged Van Dough threatens to kill both Rich parents unless they give him some of the alleged bank-money.

Enter Richie, fresh off of making it past all of Van Dough's bumbly henchmen, who comes to save the day. He does so by antagonizing Van Dough into shooting him multiple times in the chest at point blank range in front of his horrified, screaming parents. Richie comments on how cool it is to get shot in the chest, before gazing into the camera and giving the viewers at home a knowing smile and a nod.

Van Dough is stunned by this until Richie reveals he is wearing a bullet-proof vest invented by the family's comically fat scientist (He of creating-a-machine-to-turn-children-into-liquid-goo fame). Seeing his mistake, Van Dough attempts to then shoot Richie square in the face, which would have been decidedly less "cool" for Richie. However this second attempt on his son's life finally makes Richard spring to action. He knocks Van Dough out and fires him on the spot, finally getting over his aversion to the practice.

Blood Diamond

Woooo! The odds are completely stacked in my favor!

Alright, so the movie is essentially over, and the good guys have won. What follows is one of the most nonsensical finales to a movie that has ever been filmed.

Richie and his plucky friends are all now on a baseball team, and they are playing on a field on the Rich grounds. This field is decidedly non-regulation, and it can be inferred that the Rich family bribed the area's local Little League organizers into allowing teams to play on a non-regulation field with an insane home-field advantage given that is in their best player's back yard.

The game is tied in the bottom of the 9th inning and Richie is up to bat, needing to score in order to win the game. While he is batting the film cuts to the team's coach, and, hey look at that it's Reggie Goddamn Jackson. The other team has what looks to be like an overweight dad who volunteered to coach his son's baseball team in a failed attempt to bring the two of them closer together, and the Rich family decides to hire one of the greatest clutch hitters in the history of baseball to manage their side. This is incredibly morally bankrupt, and reeks of poor sportsmanship. But it seems that since Richard is okay with firing people now, common decency is beneath him.

Anyway, Richie is up to bat, and he creams the first pitch he sees for a home run... or at least it would have been. You see, the Riches, in their haste to stack this children's baseball game in their favor, didn't have the time to put a fence around the outfield. This means that there are no automatic home runs, and a player can only score one if he gets home before the outfielders can throw it home. Now, the ball goes far enough that it falls to the feet of the gardener, who picks it up. This is obvious fan interference, and would result in Richie getting a double instead of a home run, but the ump, who- look at that- is the family's scientist inventor, acts like he doesn't know this rule, and allows Richie the home run. I don't care if you are an umpire for tee ball, little league, college or a professional league, you sure as hell know the fan interference rule. The inventor had every right to put Richie on second base, and allow the game to continue. But the Rich family had made it clear, Richie's team must win at any cost. The visiting team, who were set up for failure every step of the way and still almost pulled off the victory walk off the field in heartbreak, having learned their lessons that money makes rich people better than you.

Oh, and the gardener mentioned earlier, the one that picked up the ball, yeah that was none other than Mr. Laurence Van Dough. Instead of being sent to the worst prison in America to get his ass blasted on the nightly, he is there on the Rich family grounds with no supervision, gardening. So apparently Van Dough, whose crimes include attempted murder of the entire Rich family, an act of terrorism in planting a bomb in a plane, attempted unlawful corporate takeover of Rich Industries, attempted robbery of the Rich family vault, and actually firing a gun at point blank range at a child's chest, has been given community service for his crimes. And the state has decided that his community service would be, not cleaning up a state park or making license plates or something like that, but to garden for his former employer, a man who could just as easily hire 10,000 gardeners to landscape their property. Also, this man straight up shot your child in the chest, and now you're letting him on your grounds while the child plays a baseball game?

The fuck are you doing, Rich Family?

What in the hell are you thinking? What about protecting your kid from a vengeful former employee who already tried to kill him? This is unconscionable. This is unacceptable. What, you don't think fired men can commit murder? You think this newly-poor person won't be able to shoot your rich kid again? Well let me tell you something, once fired, bullets can't be bought. A bullet only has one master, and that very well may be the man who just recently shot your child from point blank in the chest in front of you. The same man who now works unsupervised on your grounds, and who shows no remorse for his actions. This will end poorly.

RIP Richie Rich

Lessons Learned

1. Money can buy you friends
2. Getting shot multiple times in the chest at point blank range in front of your horrified, screaming parents is cool
3. Firing people isn't so bad
4. Cheating at sports is okay as long as you have money
5. Money will protect you from the bullets of poor people
6. This movie is awful