The old Woody would have never made this pap

Rating: 4/10 (24 August 2008)

When will Woody Allen get over his ridiculous obsession with the pretentious rich? It used to be that he wrote for the masses, albeit the educated, urbane masses. So maybe he just needs to get back to his New York roots (again), but for the love of Gene Shalit, could he please stop turning in such bland crap? Does anyone else remember when Allen had a real knack for snappy dialog? For characters who seemed as real as the veins on your hand? When his movies were clever, not predictable? When each movie contained a rich, vibrant atmosphere that drew from both negative and positive aspects of The Big Apple? Or did I dream about all of those movies? Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a big dud. It's about a love/lust pentagon that involves titular friends (Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johannson), on vacation in the titular town, who encounter Bohemian painter Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem). But Vicky's engaged to a sanctimonious tool (Chris Messina), and then Juan Antonio's unstable ex-wife (Penelope Cruz) shows up as well. And it being Spain, everyone's got lust on the brain, and there's plenty of partner swapping.
To begin with, the movie's far too talky. True, many of Allen's early movies were just as reliant on dialog, but in those cases - I'm looking your way, Annie Hall and Manhattan - the dialog was florid and witty. Here it's dull and placid. So you get these long stretches where two of the characters, whomever they are, will talk, and talk, and talk endlessly about whatever their current situation is, without doing much about it. These people are the poster children for passive-aggressive behavior; even when they do act on something, it's devoid of passion and meaning.
Except, of course, when Cruz shows up. Before we even meet her, Maria Elena is shown to be idolized by Juan Antonio, even after she stabbed him with a knife. She's shown as this fiery charmer with whom the charming Juan Antonio had a love-hate relationship, and when Cruz finally does appear on screen, you can see the attraction and tension between them. This is partially because of how well Bardem and Cruz work together here but also because the other actors have virtually no charisma, not even the free-wheeling, carefree, doesn't-know-what-she-wants Cristina (Johannson).
But it's not just the talkiness and the lack of passion, it's the fact that this is a Woody Allen movie that behaves more like a John Badham movie, a movie that is virtually indistinguishable from other movies in the genre 0 in this case, romantic melodrama, I assume. On the plus side, it's not as horrendous as Allen's Match Point, which started out as a romantic melodrama and then inexplicably transformed into a deranged-stalker/murderer movie, but that doesn't make this a good movie by any stretch.
Perhaps it's a bit unfair to compare this to Allen's old movies, since everyone evolves, but I do wish he'd come back to writing about middle-class characters instead of these well-to-do, conceited knuckleheads. Watching his upper-class fables reminds me more of Merchant-Ivory dramas than anything else, and perhaps we should leave those movies to the likes of Merchant and Ivory, or Whit Stillman. This is a costume-drama period piece sans costumes or, uh, a period. It's wildly predictable - you can guess the sexual permutations about 20 minutes early - and a boring footnote to the master's long career.