Has everyone lost their senses?!!!

Rating: 5/10 (21 January 2006)

I watched this film in Dublin. Where to begin, with criticism? Perhaps the first point to note is the atrociously stilted dialogue. Is that what was intended? Did Woody Allen think it was supposed to be funny/ironic? All I can say is that the few laughs that this movie did get were of a very uncertain nature; the audience--more often than not--didn't seem to know whether they laughing with the movie, or at it.
The crime that occurs is so out of character that it is really quite absurd. But Roger Ebert says: "Let us talk instead in terms of the underlying philosophical issues. To what degree are we prepared to set aside our moral qualms in order to indulge in greed and selfishness?" Now, that really is making a silk purse out of a sow's ear!
The critics who have praised this movie seem to me to have read far too much into it. It seems to me that the whole thing was a shaggy-dog story that led up to one big joke at the end, and it wasn't worth the wait as far as I was concerned. However it is clear that most reviewers in IMDb think otherwise. Has the world gone mad?!