Not a love game

Rating: 3/10 (17 March 2018)

A tennis coach (Chris Wilson, played unconvincingly by Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is welcomed into the absurdly rich and unrealistically "British" Hewett family. He ends up engaged to the daughter, Chloe, played uncomfortably by Emily Mortimer. Curtesy of the Hewetts Chris is also installed in an unreal "city finance" job and introduced to the son's fiancée, Nola (Scarlett Johansson). Despite everyone's huge dependence on old man Hewett, Chris starts to feel more attracted to the wrong girl - Nola - even while engaged to Chloe. What could possibly go wrong?
Almost everything, in fact. For whatever reason, nothing gels. Nothing feels right. Not the Hewett family, not the company, not the apartment where Chris and Chloe "live" (which looks suspiciously like an office reception). But most of all, it's Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who's rarely off the screen. His eyes are quite remarkably blue, but that doesn't do it for me. He's stiff, wooden and uninvolving.
Maybe also, the style of the piece is not suited to Woody Allen's skills. The lies and deception give rise to tensions that are too predictable and not well portrayed. And the wheeling and dealing in the City contrasted with the calm of the country are not really at all like New York, where most of Allen's best movies are set.
It's been suggested that the closer you are to living in west London and the home counties, where most of the action is set, the less you tend to like the film. Well I live quite close and I certainly don't like it.
Scarlett Johansson I have not yet mentioned. Her early flirtiness is somewhat overplayed, like almost everything else, but later on some of her dialogue plays rather better and this raises the film for me to the dizzying heights of 3/10.