A good film ruined by lack of imagination and balls

Rating: 6/10 (21 January 2006)

This movie reminded me of Face/Off, an excellent movie to a point - then the ending is just rubbish. Here, the acting is good, there's opera and tennis (both of which I love), everything seems real (I always dig it when I forget I'm watching a movie, not real life) - then about 2/3 into the film, he's starts to load his father-in-law's shotgun and I'm thinking "OH NO, PLEASE WOODY ALLEN - DON'T SAY YOU CAME UP WITH NOTHING ELSE FOR THE ENDING BUT A MURDER?!" Unfortunately he did not. Before that I'd been very excited to see how this movie ends - how everything pans out. After that, I didn't much care. Then it was just "Does he get caught or doesn't he?". HOW NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN, WOODY. A cold blooded killing! Whoa. It's wild how often you "get" to see murders and killings in movies - in start contrast to their rareness in people's real lives. Is this what people want? Because I know I don't!
And I don't mean war films etc. can't show blood or anything - it's just I'm so disappointed by the last 1/3 of this film I can't put it to words (OK, the ring's hitting the fence in the end like a tennis ball was good). Because before that this was shaping to become a classic film - I even completely agree with the notion that's thrown around many times, how much in life just comes down to luck.
I'm dumbfounded by the commonplaceness, unimaginativeness and viewer-intelligence-insultingness of the anticlimax that is the ending for this movie. Sad that Woody had so little LUCK in trying to devise a great finale.
7 out of 10 here means "9+ for the first 66%, 2 1/2 for the last third".