Deja Vu All Over Again.

Rating: 5/10 (3 January 2009)

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You can't call Woody Allen's latest film crap. The truth is, if his name wasn't attached to it, it would pass as a serviceable piece of estrogen pandering movie-making, yet even without his name, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is plagued by the all-too visible Woody Allen watermark. At this twilight stage in Allen's career he seems hellbent on proving Renoir's rumination individual filmmakers are doomed to make the same film over and over again. The problem with this pattern of redoing everything he's done before, Allen is dangerously close to tarnishing his reputation and is well past the point of evidencing he's merely a mortal. It hurts to realize that this American icon is not a genius...he's just a guy who found his little niche and was savvy enough to perfect it. But Woody perfected this art nearly twenty years ago and in the twenty years since, he's done nothing but turn his art into an archetype.
As longtime Allen watchers have come to expect, the actors may change, but the characters and the non-stop dialogue remains exactly the same. Perhaps there's comfort in this familiarity, which would explain why critics and his adoring followers are so reluctant to call Allen out for this sham. How many times can one stomach the same neuroses, the same speech patterns and rhythms, the same interchangeable references to classical music/literature/cinema and the same setup and delivery of jokes? Worst of all, the plots have been recycled so many times that they've become transparently predictable.
Unless you're not acquainted with Allen's formula, seconds after polar opposites Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) meet the charming Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), you know exactly how ironically the events will play out. He may not be the genius we all once thought he was, but Woody is still a very smart guy, begging the question: isn't he aware of the pointlessness of remaking the same film ad nauseam? Isn't it embarrassing for him to reveal how incredibly limited his palate is? Isn't it humiliating to show he's got nothing left to offer? Does he even care?
Yet despite the well worn formula, VCB still manages to be a watchable movie with a handful of great (albeith isolated) moments. Bardem and Penelope Cruz prove to be the scene stealers, perhaps taking liberty with their native tongue and adding a truly foreign (and fresh) dimension to the carefully regurgitated screenplay. Their chemistry proves to be as convincing as it is compelling and without these two, VCB would have been lost in expanding bog of forgettable films Woody has dutifully churned out on cue over the last few decades.