Whatever Works

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Woody Allen has always been a prolific director (usually a movie a year; You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger is all ready to go, and Midnight In Paris is in pre-production) but it has been only lately (bar the fun Vicky Cristina Barcelona, his last outing) that his quality control has dipped. With such a fertile output there was always going to be a few stinkers and Whatever Works can be counted among them.

To call Boris (David) a misanthrope would be an understatement: according to the physics professor and one-time Nobel Prize nominee, the world is full of "idiots," "morons," "cretins," "incompetents," and "twits". "Mental midgets" pops up once in a while too. While Boris lurches across New York (a side effect from an unsuccessful suicide attempt), pontificating on the dire state of the universe, he bumps into Melody (Wood), a runaway from an affluent Mississippi family. Seeing her as a black canvas that he can paint with his tired cynicism, Boris takes the naïve waif in and soon love blossoms. The relationship takes an unexpected turn when Melody's mother (Clarkson) turns up...

Fans of Allen will find themselves in familiar and comfortable territory with Whatever Works. After a typical '40s style opening credits, the first scene sees Boris and his buddies contemplating religion and Karl Marx with the expected acerbic zingers. The familiarity continues there on out. A heated up leftover from an unused 70s script, the material in Whatever Works has been touched on before by Allen numerous times: the asides to camera, the learned older man and the green young woman, the soapbox venting. It's all old stuff. This is Allen at his laziest. There's no imagination to the direction, which is very stagey and flat, and when he/Boris runs out of subjects to rant about, Whatever Works, realising that it has now nowhere to go, throws itself headlong into ropey rom-com territory. One of the ropiest around, it can get so bad it borders on parody.

The casting of Larry David can divide opinion – yes, he seems like the obvious choice to voice Allen's concerns with the world but therein lies the problem: it's obvious, which is something that's been alien to the majority of Allen's films. David bounces around with energy when the film is concerned with him, but he is elbowed to the side at the halfway mark to make room for Melody's family who take over the show. David's Boris isn't the everyman Allen wants him to be and he's too nasty, too abrasive to garner sympathy for his plight. Wood's Melody is bursting with that ditsy Amy Adams shtick but is too stupid to care about. Even Manhattan, which always figures big with Allen, lacks character.

There are a few laughs to be found, but the audience, whom Allen addresses from time to time here, are used to funnier comedies from the man. This is second-hand Woody.