Hackneyed

Rating: 4/10 (28 August 2012)

Hollywood should stop Woody Allen producing movies if he is to recycle his genres over and over and over again.
'To Rome With Love' is a clichéd Woody Allen piece with his hackneyed signatures like multi-layered love stories, couples that came together due to accidents and a babbling, irritating Woody Allen in whichever boring roles he wrote for himself - that last bit has not changed a bit since Annie Hall and man, that was over 30 years ago.
While the film has moments of brilliance, the odd but banal plot does not save the day: Alec Baldwin's part was cheesy and awkward, and one wonders why his younger companions were not annoyed by his presence; what happened to Benigni was left unexplained - in a way it needs no explanation but it sounds ridiculous from the beginning - leaving one feeling somewhat disconnected to the story. In fact, all the stories are not connected, but it is not like Paris Je T'aime where the audience knows it contains unrelated stories. At times, I feel that Woody Allen was trying to make the stories stick together but failed. The incoherence has created such distance between the plot and the audience that the whole film looks like nothing more than a showcase of brilliant actors whose only job was to be beautiful in Rome.