Bad girl in sooth

Rating: 3/10 (10 June 2007)

This movie presents Scarlett Johanssen as a sultry femme fatale; and there's the rub. To me she looks like an open-mouthed Valley girl whom I'd expect to see working in the food court at the mall...except that those girls generally have more passion, and are more attractive. Judging by the reviews she gets, Johanssen sends a lot of middle-aged men into a tailspin, and I imagine that's how she wins a role like this--and indeed, tends to behave very much like a young actress working hard at doing so by wrapping a middle-aged producer around her nubile finger. But she is no vamp, and here, she's hardly an actress; her inexpressiveness of face, voice, and body makes a big hole at the center of a production that is half-baked at best: the characters and dialogue are in some early-draft stage, and the direction goes no farther in realizing them. And so were they in the only other late film of Woody Allen's that I've seen; he now seems to write and direct as Jack Nicholson now seems to act, content with work that is characteristic enough for the body of fans to recognize it as "so Woody" ("so Jack"), and to assume its merit as thereby proved. The only definite achievement of this film is to show Jonathan Rhys-Meyers in a persona other than that which he brought to his first movies--that of the Antichrist--in every case more or less inappropriately; so he may turn out to be good for something, after all.