Woody Allen has the Curse

The Curse of the Jade Scorpion

by D. K. Holm, www.cinemonkey.com

urse of the Jade Scorpion finds Woody Allen in what you might call Coen Brothers mode, except that Allen has been mining this particular vein of nostalgia for some time—and less ably than the Coens. Another hommage to Bob Hope and the films of the '30s, with Allen in the cowardly-competent role, and feeling very much more like an old radio show than a movie, Allen's film has the burnished competence of his recent work but comes across like a brief sketch exaggerated into a film. Has Allen entered another slump, like his fabled and arguably bad '80s phase of Zelig and A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy.

The story concerns an insurance investigator C. W. Briggs (Allen) who has a hostile relationship with a new office manager, Betty Ann Fitzgerald (Helen Hunt, still vocalizing as she did for years on TV and in Twister, with uniform rising inflections at the ends of sentences). Their feud is defined by rather long winded insult metaphors like something out of the old series Flying Blind. At a company outing, the duo are hypnotized on stage (by a sleepwalking David Ogden Stiers) and soon enough they become his slaves, robbing people insured by their very company. Eventually, as every viewer will predict easily, the pair really do love each other and team up to expose the hypnotist's plan.

Like all too many of "late" Allen films, the movie basically just lays there and waits for itself to be over. The viewer gets the impression that the script has been in a drawer for a long time, before being dragged out for no better reason than that Allen must make two movies a year. It's not even a loving parody of the genre. It's a loving replication of it. Perhaps at one point Allen felt passionately about the material, but here he brings little to the enterprise, and worse, seems to have no other motivation than to submerge himself in the world of films enjoyed in childhood, all performed under the impression that he has numerous fans out there awaiting anything he might be in. Box office receipts contradict this belief. Also as usual Allen hides his discomfort with filmmaking behind an expert cinematographer, in this case Zhao Fei. But the film's classical formality cannot make up for an inert narrative mostly free of good jokes.

The interesting thing to realize about this version of the Allen oeuvre is that for a guy with a reputation for humor he doesn't know how to present something funny. Often the obviously-meant-to-be-snappy dialogue just doesn't work as played. The characters utter it too fast without understanding what they are saying.

reamWorks's single sided and single layered disc comes with the usual amount of added value material that consumers are used to on a Woody Allen release (until the no doubt forthcoming day when all his films are re-released with elaborate extras). The transfer is superb; the mono sound is more than adequate to a talky movie with some music in it. There's the theatrical trailer as well as production notes (replicated on a four page insert) and cast and crew filmographies, all in a keep case.

1/02

Return to Archive Index

Return to Top