The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
**1/2
Cinema
Releases - December 6, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate PG. USA.
103 minutes. Written and directed by Woody Allen. Starring Woody Allen, Helen
Hunt, Dan Aykroyd, Charlize Theron, Elizabeth Berkley, Brian Markinson, Wallace
Shawn, David Ogden Stiers, John Schuck, Michael Mulheren, Peter Linari, Irwin
Corey.
Woody Allen's "The Curse of the Jade
Scorpion" is set in an insurance office in the early 1940s. Its actors
include Dan Aykroyd, Wallace Shawn, Charlize Theron and Allen himself. They
farcically buzz around rooms full of incessant typewriter noise, ask each
other "What's the idea?", try to solve a mystery, and, well, you get the
idea.
Allen plays C.W. Briggs, an A-OK worker in the
investigative department who has a better knack for catching crooks than
any of those bozos who work for local detective agencies. His big rival at
the office is an efficiency expert named BettyAnn Fitzgerald (Helen Hunt),
who thinks C.W. is a sleazy little rodent and doesn't want to hear a thing
he says. The two go to a bar one night in an attempt to clear the air, but
the conversation disintegrates into the following:
Hunt: "Don't walk me to the
door, I don't want people to think we're together."
Allen: "Why, do I look like
an organ grinder?"
Hunt: "Just an
organ."
The plot takes off when Allen and Hunt attend
an office night out, and become volunteers for a hypnotist called Voltan
Polgar (David Ogden Stiers). He makes the pair think they're in love with
each, which is good for a few laughs and sets up the film's ending, but more
importantly gets two insurance workers under the hypnotist's spell, so he
can telephone them at odd hours and get them to steal their clients'
jewels.
So, we get a comedy in which the joke is that
Allen is furiously trying to solve a case of theft but doesn't know that
he is the culprit. There is the gag of seeing he and Hunt wander around like
zombies when they fall under Polgar's hypnotic spell. There is the humour
of frustration when Allen becomes a suspect ("You know, there's a word for
people who think everyone is conspiring against them." "Yeah -- perceptive!").
And there is of course a lot of slapstick comedy in the climax, when Allen
has figured out what's going on and has to break free of police custody to
uncover Polgar's sinister plot.
Is this funny? Yeah, kinda. Woody Allen is perhaps
my favourite working director, and even his lesser films have a certain easy
charm about them. "Curse of the Jade Scorpion" is cute in its old-fashioned
nature, good-looking with its golden hue, clever and admirable in its many
moments of snappy, rapid-fire dialogue.
But somehow it doesn't all come together. It's
not that the material is lacking, but, incredibly for an Allen picture, that
the delivery is off-kilter. Woody himself is too jittery and nervous; I'm
a fan of the Allen persona, but here, especially in the early scenes, his
manic delivery seems forced, and he stutters and waves his hands in a manner
that gets in the way of dialogue. Perhaps the guy is too accustomed to playing
characters that are supposed to go over the top to know when to draw the
line. Hunt, with her low and distinctly contemporary voice, seems less like
a smart, sassy Hollywood heroine than a character of dull pig-headedness.
She fills this role, but without poetry or conviction. Where's Rosalind Russell
when we need her? Or even Diane Keaton?
Even when the actors get things right, their scenes
have unevenness and distance. Allen's camerawork often has something of a
documentary quality about it; his shots are not unknown to stand back when
other directors would go for close-ups, and sometimes when characters move
their conversations into hallways, Allen follows them by moving the camera
instead of cutting away. That works just fine when lines are supposed to
seem spontaneous, but this is material requiring a more constructed kind
of theatrical punchiness. "Curse of the Jade Scorpion" feels loose -- we
end up knowing where we want to laugh instead of just going ahead and
laughing.
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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