comments are closed on this review, click here for worldwidereview home
From: Marker
Category: Films
Date: 30 January 2006
Allen has made a film that doesn't seem like a woodie, besides that it's not that great. However by making a thriller set in London with no lovable neurotics he has for the first time in many years escaped himself and made a thought-provoking movie. A contradiction.
The hero is a blank faced social climber, not fully drawn, somehow withdrawn, who in his Russian novelistic violence surprises the viewer and strains credibility. The question is whether the absurdity of the end is too much, or by making one reconsider what has gone before it rescues a loose and badly dialogued film. Allen gets wrong amongst other things: the upper classes (the bisto woman as matriarch), London, murder, and conversation. He does manage to create tension and not get bogged down by subtlety especially in his overdone opera analogy.
Johanssen is bearble as the bait, the antihero cannot convey much in term of hidden depths of evil or weakness, the posh brother in law a more carcicatured hugh grant (it's possible), and various Uk tv actors pop up in odd roles.
Let us pray, or get lucky, in Woody Allen going forward in unfamilar cultures to create more and better existential mystery movies.
comments are closed on this review, click here for worldwidereview home