Stunningly Unbelievable Codswallop

Rating: 5/10 (22 January 2007)

First of all, let me say I like Woody Allen. Okay, he's very hit and miss, right across the scale. But when he gets it completely right (like "Bullets Over Broadway" or "Mighty Aphrodite"): just, full marks.
If you're from midtown America and you're watching this, you just *might* be clueless enough to buy into the whole "jolly hockey sticks, more tea vicar" world that Woody Allen has written. But this is a film populated by utterly ridiculous stereotypes, swanning around in an idealized London Tourist Board picture postcard. Steve Martin's "L.A. Story" looks like a striking, visceral work of searing realism in comparison.
Myers is an unlikeable creep from the get go (there were odd moments I thought he was channelling Malcolm McDowell, but they never really surfaced), and the brother and sister duo are just so "ma and pa are going to Henley", I watched in disbelief. (Yes, such people exist. I know some of them. But for god's sake, Woody: try and populate the rest of your cast with a little diversity. This is a movie populated by the factory from "The Stepford Wives", with the computer chip switched to "British English". Where an actress doesn't go for an audition in some room in Soho...no, she goes (of course!) to the Royal Court Theatre. Were everyone shoots. And their father is on the board of some company. And...oh, for the love of mike. Just stop already.
Part of the problem is, Allen -- in Britain -- seems to have forgotten the working men's clubs and the REAL sense of Britain he experienced in his days there in standup. His existence now is defined by walking through a lobby where a man holds the door open: whether it's the Upper East Side, or London's Belgravia. When the characters in this go movie the cinema, they don't head to Leicester Square to see "Bond" or "Night At The Museum". Hell, no. They head off to the Curzon Mayfair to see "The Motorcycle Diaries".
British writer Richard Curtis might write fluffy disposable pastiches of quaint English-ism, but at least his entire cast isn't populated by vapid upper class twerps. Imagine the American version: all of Dan Ackroyd's irritating Club friends in "Trading Places", trying to make you genuinely care about a "searing" illicit romance.
Get a grip, Woody. You can't write British. Period. (That'd be "full-stop", by the way.)