It once meant something in film circles when you talked about ’’the new Woody Allen movie.’’ But Allen hasn’t been much more than a confectioner lately, and watching his work has generally placed somewhere along a continuum of enjoyable to impossible.
At one time or another, The Curse of the Jaded Scorpion is both, although it’s mostly the latter: briskly written with very little imagination, beautifully decorated from old photographs, and so thoroughly taken by its wafer-thin concept that it’s all brain and no heart.
If Allen insists on doing the same thing year after year-i.e., pick a period, pick a genre, pick a theme, and then beat it to death with style and class-then he’s forcing me to say the same thing year after year: Woody Allen is no longer an artist to anticipate. In fact, more and more, he’s becoming one to avoid.
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion is a ’40s-era faux film that finds Allen casting himself (self consciously) as C.W. Briggs, an investigator for a successful but declining insurance agency. He has lots of snitches and good instincts, so he manages to crack a lot of cases, although finding a stolen Picasso was especially hard because he didn’t know he had to look for a dismembered woman with a square nose (Briggs prefers curves).
But recently his beloved job has become a nightmare. His boss (Dan Aykroyd) has hired Betty Ann Fitzgerald (Helen Hunt), a brainy, sharp-tongued efficiency expert with a degree from Vassar and no tolerance for a mordant myopic womanizer like Briggs.
Things get worse for Briggs when, at a birthday party for a colleague, he and Betty Ann become guinea pigs for a larcenous hypnotist (David Ogden Stiers) who puts them under his spell-cast by dangling an ancient jade scorpion on a chain-and makes them fall passionately in love for a few moments, to the amusement of their friends who know how passionately they hate each other.
When the spell ends, its back to cats and dogs for Betty Ann and Briggs-except that the hypnotist secretly keeps Briggs in his control and has him pull jewel heists at the prompting of a magic word. It eventually falls upon Briggs to solve the very robberies that he is committing.
What follows from this is a plot even too predictable for a spoof and a script not nearly funny or cagey enough to keep you entertained. Allen gets the rhythm of 1940s dialogue close to right, except for those moments he compromises the banter for shtick. He just doesn’t have any where to go with this kind of movie, and his jokes are so flat you need a spatula to get them off the page.
When things get especially tense between the destined feuding lovers, Briggs tells Betty Ann that she has to stop using her brain too much and try using her heart. Of course she finally learns the lesson, so once again Allen can walk off into his Manhattan moonlight with a beautiful woman half his age who wouldn’t look twice at him if he wasn’t writing the script.
As played by the wincing Hunt, Betty Ann is an Actor’s Studio of rehearsal and gray matter, like Roz Russell with no bite or Kate Hepburn with no spark. The supporting cast of insurance agents and private detectives include familiar middle aged character actors like John Shuck, Wallace Shawn and Peter Gerety, with the vacuous Elizabeth Berkley on hand to play an office secretary at whom they all leer.
Allen’s stalwert production designer, Santo Loquasto, handsomely recreates the tacky deco interiors of mid-century New York apartments and even a hallway in Grand Central Station with ’’mens room’’ misspelled on a door. The music is Ellington, James-in other words, been there, done that. Allen once said, ’’That a relationship, like a shark, must constantly be on the move or else will die.’’ And so to paraphrase: ’’What we have here is a dead filmmaker.’’