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Review: Crime does not play in 'Small Time Crooks'
(CNN) -- Movie fans will be glad to know that the junk shop of Woody Allen's mind has been further emptied of clutter with "Small Time Crooks," another half-baked picture from a major filmmaker who's gotten incredibly lazy in his old age. Given Allen's sloppy output since 1990, younger filmgoers may find it hard to believe that he was once a director who virtually everyone could agree was consistently turning out distinctive, thoughtful movies.
Even if you didn't care for his Fifth Avenue neuroses and stuttering pontifications on higher culture, you couldn't deny that Allen's work was a coherent, ongoing examination of his own psyche. And his dazzling verbal agility (honed in his first career as a groundbreaking stand-up comic) was an especially cerebral throwback to the heyday of Preston Sturges. No doubt about it, Allen is a Hall of Famer. But he's unexpectedly regressed from hitting home runs to barely beating out bunts. Nowadays he sometimes even whiffs on consecutive pitches. "Small Time Crooks" is a great deal better than 1998's altogether dreadful "Celebrity," but so less effective than "Annie Hall" (1977) and "Manhattan" (1979) that it's pointless even to force a comparison. Digging belowAllen stars as Ray Winkler, an ex-con dishwasher who's suddenly inspired to commit another crime when he spots a vacant storefront that's situated smack against a ritzy-looking bank. The opening scene suggests that Allen may once again be in top form. Ray explains his over-ambitious scheme to Frenchy (Tracey Ullman), his incredulous, wisecracking wife, and the couple's snarling banter is hilarious. It's a different kind of dialogue than Allen usually writes, full of the vitriol that arises when couples alternate between loving and hating each other for too many years. There's also a strange fascination in seeing him play a lower-class character, something Allen rarely does. It's downhill from there, though. Pretty soon, virtually all of the gags hinge on little more than across-the-board, colossal stupidity. Ray quickly gathers a crack team of interchangeable morons to help him dig a tunnel between the store's basement and the bank vault. Jon Lovitz, Tony Darrow and Michael Rapaport are the gang members. Their conversations, without fail, repeatedly establish that they're incapable of grasping Ray's plan. An occasional one-liner hits the mark -- this is, after all, a Woody Allen movie. But, for the most part, they're firing blanks. One would hope that Rapaport has very little in common with the bone-headed characters that he's made a career out of playing. He's a single-note actor if ever there was one, and the note is growing especially tiresome. Baking aboveFrenchy and her supremely dim-witted sister, May (Elaine May), cover for the operation by running a homemade cookie shop upstairs while the guys drill and blast their way through the downstairs wall. It's not long before the basement is flooded by a broken water pipe. Ray also holds the map upside down and ends up with a tunnel leading to a nearby clothing store. But the cookie shop is unexpectedly taking off. Frenchy's baked goods draw huge crowds while Ray and the boys are busy being idiots beneath the floorboards. Fade to black. It's a year later. Frenchy and Ray are now famous, filthy-rich cookie magnates, and the other would-be bank robbers are their well-paid underlings. That's right. A full two-thirds of the movie has nothing whatsoever to do with criminal activity, small-time or otherwise. The script works like one of those especially bizarre episodes of "The Simpsons," where the first section of the story turns out to be little more than an elaborate misdirection play. Suddenly, you're dealing with a weak comedy of manners in which Ray and Frenchy -- living now in a tastelessly over-decorated penthouse -- are challenged by the intellectual rigors of cocktail parties with Manhattan's idle class. This is not a graceful segue into another chapter of the characters' lives. In recent years, Allen has taken to inelegantly forcing disjointed gags together, then hanging them on the thinnest thread of a story. Then he tosses the dice and hopes that people will think he's written a script. It's not just unamusing, it's downright sad, especially if you were a fan when he still felt the need to put a great deal of effort into the writing process. Remember, this guy has won an armful of Oscars. He's fallen so far by now, he could be any old hack trying to make a big-screen buck off a "Saturday Night Live" skit.
Scheming all aroundRay, who would much rather eat spaghetti and watch an old movie in lieu of feigning well-bred small talk, soon starts growing apart from Frenchy. All she wants is to fit in with their snooty friends and spend money on tacky furnishings, so she hires an art-dealer acquaintance (played by Hugh Grant) to teach her about the finer things in life. But the teacher sets his sights on stealing her away from Ray so that he can get his hands on her fortune. Grant's character is so casually written, he's basically a matching shirt and tie with a British accent. He could, however, win a Nobel Prize for Best Hair. The last hour is a series of skits centering on Frenchy's ineffective attempts to seem learned and Ray's wholly effective attempts to seem dumb as an ox. Allen needs to take a break, live his life for a couple of years, then return to filmmaking when he has something to make a film about.
Back when "Manhattan" was released to well-deserved adulation, a Time magazine writer suggested that it should be sealed in a time capsule so that future generations could see how Americans were living in the late 1970s. "Alice," (1990) "Shadows and Fog," (1992) "Mighty Aphrodite," (1995) "Celebrity" and "Small Time Crooks" should be sealed up to save our grandchildren from having to watch them. "Small Time Crooks" is thankfully free of the sudden profanity that marred the last few Woody Allen movies. There's really nothing offensive here, unless you care about a respected artist's withering reputation. Rated PG. 95 minutes. RELATED STORIES: A big time in 'Small Time Crooks' RELATED SITES: Official 'Small Time Crooks' site |
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