Directed by Woody Allen

Reports that this supposed dream ticket of Woody Allen and Larry David is a return to form for the director are, sadly, highly exaggerated. There's little new or fresh about this reiteration of the particular form of ennui that Allen's made his own, which isn't that surprising considering it's a project which he began in the 70s with Zero Mostel in mind. That, then, might have been different. Now, David, in what is clearly the ‘Woody' part (complete with obligatory nubile young bride), whom I like enormously in Curb Your Enthusiasm, looks stiffly uncomfortable pattering out the one-liners and dry witticisms like a stand-up on autocue.

He's Boris Yellnikov (a name he pronounces with pedantic weariness just to underline for us how funny it is) an irascible New York academic who spends the film haranguing everyone with his dim view of humanity, the meaninglessness of existence, etc etc. This ‘everyone' includes not just his ‘friends' (though hardly worthy of the name, as he lives in an egotistic self-righteous bubble that pays no concern to anyone else), but us the audience, as many lines are spoken through the ‘fourth wall', to camera. This is something that often has worked well for Woody, but here we're not given asides like confidants but addressed en masse like a public meeting. Although there are the occasional laughs, this perpetual whinge all too soon becomes intensely dislikeable and irritating, and it doesn't get any better.

He is narrator of his own story - a divorced failed suicide, who one day returns to his distinctly odd flat to find Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood), a dimwitted but charming girl who flaps her arms a lot from the Deep South, homeless in the big city, outside his door. He reluctantly invites her in (unlikely I'd say), and soon they're married. It's a kind of Born Yesterday mismatch which might have yielded a decent comic plot, but there's no exchange between the two - he talks, she doesn't understand, neither responds to the other. The plot takes a plunge into broader farce when her dotty southern belle mother (Patricia Clarkson) and then upstanding pillar of the community father (Ed Begley Jnr) arrive, both to be miraculously changed overnight by the alchemy of the city into (she) a sexually adventurous artist and (he) a happy gay ( the latter transformation particularly cornily presented). Worse, young Melodie is beguiled by handsome rich and smarmy Englishman Randy (ho ho), played in unbelievably wooden fashion by Henry Cavill. But who can really blame him with lines like that? And Boris is on his own again. Yet against all the odds there's one of those Shakespearian comedy happy endings where everyone has their someone. I'd have preferred them all dead on the stage, Hamlet fashion. A smiling Boris explains to us the stunningly original idea that we should go for happiness in whatever way works for us. Well, it didn't work for me, and I left the cinema in a state of profound depression. It's enough to turn us all into Borises. Call myself a Woody Allen fan? Not for much longer, at this rate.

Seen at Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, 25 June 2010