Woody's worst

Rating: 1/10 (30 August 2001)

This is by a long way Woody Allen's worst film ever. It is even worse than his early efforts Take the Money and run and Bananas. The slapstick is excruciating. Allen trips over his rifle when he marches and gooses women with his sword when he bows. The verbal humour is even thinner. One can only imagine that Allen was taking an evening class in philosophy at the time he wrote the script; some of the supposedly funny verbal exchanges between Boris and Sonia could have been lifted straight from his philosophy homework.
Allen returns more successfully to the Russian novel as inspiration in Crimes and Misdemeanours. The moral anguish over whether to kill one man, Napoleon, for the good of many foreshadows similar themes in Crimes and Misdemeanours and Bullets Over Broadway but the treatment here is very immature.