A very significant waste of time

Rating: 2/10 (27 August 2009)

This was the third Woody Allen movie I've watched, and so clearly I'm no Allen expert. However this film satisfies me that three is enough.
This was an appalling film. The characters were 2-dimensional and uninteresting. I didn't care enough about Vicki or Cristina as characters to be interested about their relationships with each other or with Juan Antonio. The first half hour of the movie is annoyingly disjointed, as it is frequently punctuated by a very unnecessary American narrator, pointlessly telling us about who the characters are and what they're doing, instead of allowing us to understand them through an old-style technique called 'acting'.
The character of Juan Antonio's wife spends the entire movie screaming, telling us more about Allen's own relationships with woman than about the characters in this film. And again, we don't care about her - we just wish she would shut up and go away. The only character that isn't 2-dimensional is Vicki's husband - he's so flat he's 1-dimensional. The term "cookie cutter" is used by the characters, and that could not be a more ironic description.
The cinematography is lovely and there are some great shots of Catalanian architecture, including La Sagrada Familia (studied intensively by Vicki yet who still refers to it ignorantly as "Gaudi's Church"). The script is recycled and the plot is uninspiring. The movie left me feeling emptiness and disappointment - please take this as a health warning and save your own time for something better.