The Curse Of The Jade Scorpion

Now, we all know that Woody Allen has not been up to his usual standards lately. I mean, Small Time Crooks? Come on! And it doesn’t look like he’s coming out of that stupor anytime soon. (Although the previews for his new one, Hollywood Ending, look pretty good.)

This time out he plays CW Briggs, an insurance investigator who is in a war with a new efficiency expert, Betty Ann Fitzgerald (Helen Hunt). She’s out to make the office into a modern (for the 40s, anyway) machine whereas he’s ready to keep things the way that they are and run on gut instinct and sexual harassment.

When the two of them are hypnotized by Voltan (David Ogden Stiers) at a party they are made to think that they are helplessly in love and trapped on a deserted island. Of course, when they wake up from the trance they have no idea that they were even hypnotized.

A few days later Voltan calls CW and whispers his secret word to him. He then sends the little nebbish detective on a search for some very valuable jewels. CW wakes up and no recollection of ever even seeing the jewels so, unbeknownst to him, he’s after himself.

There’s some almost interesting stuff going on between CW and Betty Ann, but it’s all been done before. They hate each other in real life, but in their hypnotized lives they are madly in love with each other. Are they only acting out their actual fantasies? Or is it only the power of suggestion?

And what’s the inevitable conclusion to this sort of thing when there’s Woody Allen and a young woman involved? I think you know.

I think the whole idea has kinda been done to death. Who hasn’t seen a movie about people who do strange and even illegal things under hypnosis? Come on. Raise you hands.

I guess I liked the movie and all, but it wasn’t anything very special or memorable. I think Woody needs to slow down and maybe make a movie every two years instead of every year. Maybe he could get all of the good jokes together and make one great movie instead of two mediocre ones. Because there are some good gags here, but they’re kinda few and far between. Maybe if he had put this one and Small Time Crooks together something pretty good could have come of it. As it is we’ve got two of Woody’s lesser flicks that are just good time wasters as opposed to the great films that he used to put out.