Broken English

Rating: 6/10 (26 January 2006)

OK, so Woody Allen's worst is better than most people's best, but this is drivel. Perhaps he thinks posh Brits speak like Noel Coward characters, but apart from Matthew Goode as Tom and Emily Mortimer as Chloe, none of the main characters sounded like real people. Thank goodness for Ewen Bremner and James Nesbit's appearances in the final section - they managed to bring something vaguely normal to proceedings. I would have thought Woody Allen knows enough about London to know how not to make a film look like low-rent Richard Curtis, but perhaps 'Notting Hill' and 'Love Actually' are his source material. Would it have been too much trouble to employ someone to work as a language consultant to make the dialogue sound like something other than a bad translation of Ibsen? Was the ridiculous first encounter between Scarlet Johansson and Jonathan Rhys Meyers meant to sound like an an out-take from a 40s film noir? Perhaps, to use that favourite Hollywood catch-all excuse, Allen is being ironic. No, to use a truly British phrase, he is just being a bit rubbish.