Hey folks, Harry here... ol' Fred Mertz seems to be coming at us fast and furious with a whole bevy of early reviews recently... and this one is a WAY EARLY review... Woody Allen's THE CURSE OF THE JADE SCORPION doesn't come out for months and months... August, I believe... yet here we have instant, right-now word on where it is at the moment... and according to Fred Mertz, it seems to be doing great! I love a good Woody Allen film, and this has the hallmarks. Read on...
THE CURSE OF THE JADE SCORPION
There are some directors who you just flock to see even when you don't have a clue as to what the film is about. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose miserably, but you go faithfully because you've seen the magic before and you know it can happen again.
I was lucky enough to see an early cut of Woody Allen's new film, "Curse of the Jade Scorpion". When I first heard the title, I immediately thought it was Woody's martial arts epic we've all been waiting for... well not really, but the title made me think it would perhaps be a Charlie Chan type of film, which wasn't so far off.
This is screwball comedy Woody. This is Bullets Over Broadway, Take the Money and Run, Broadway Danny Rose, and Manhattan Murder Mystery, Woody. The dialogue is fast paced and the look of the film is Coen Bros. Hudsucker Proxy-esque. The film takes place in 1940 and it looks delicious. The camera work by Haskell Wexler and the set design by Santo Loquasto are superb. They both deserve some recognition for this one come Oscar time next year.
As for the movie, it worked really well. I do want to stress that what I saw was a very early cut of the film. It wasn't the finished product. The cut I saw ran about 111 minutes, a bit long for Woody's standards.
In it, Woody plays an Insurance Investigator who specializes in handling insurance fraud cases. He's the crusty old school star of the office where he works with fellow investigator Wallace Shawn (My Dinner With Andre, Princess Bride).
Elizabeth Berkeley of Showgirls fame pops up in a small part as the sexy secretary of the office and she handles herself well enough that she fits in the movie.
The head of the Insurance Agency is played by Dan Aykroyd. Dan turns in a good understated performance. He's not playing Doctor Detroit here, he's much more restrained and it works.
The female lead of the movie is Helen Hunt. She plays an efficiency expert at the insurance company who is trying to phase out Woody's old school ways of discovering insurance fraud. Hunt was wonderful in this, but there's a weird thing in the dialogue she does that just fell flat. At the end of scenes with Woody she is prone to saying stuff like, "I hope you don't walk outside and get hit by a bus and get your body terribly mangled beyond recognition..." She does variations on that throughout the movie and it pretty much sucks. I don't blame her though, I blame the dialogue. It's a weak bit, but the rest of her performance is top notch. She and Woody are usually at each others throats in this and it harkens back to the good screwball romantic comedies of the 30's and 40's, i.e. "It Happened One Night".
Charlize Theron has a small role in this and she absolutely steals the movie. She reminds me so much of Veronica Lake in this and Woody does all he can to keep up with her rich spoiled horny socialite heiress in their few scenes together.
The plot has so many twists that I can't even list them all here... but the basic premise is Woody gets framed for a bunch of jewel robberies...but he's not totally innocent...
SPOILER WARNING
In an early scene at a nightclub we meet "The Jade Scorpion," a hypnotist/nightclub performer played perfectly by David Ogden Stiers. At the nightclub, he hypnotizes Woody and Helen Hunt into believing they are madly in love with each other. It's a funny bit since everyone knows they hate each other. But the plot of the Jade Scorpion doesn't end there. Later, under hypnosis, he gets Woody to break into mansions covered by the Insurance Company. Woody has all the ins and outs of the security layout of these mansions in his company files making it a clean theft.
Whenever The Jade Scorpion calls on Woody, he uses a special word to put him under his spell. Woody's word is "Istanbul" and later, when the Jade Scorpion enlists Hunt in the crimes, he uses her code word, "Madagascar". When they hear those words they fall instantly under hypnosis and are passionately in love with each other while under the spell of The Jade Scorpion.
What happens the rest of the way is a lot of fun between Hunt and Woody. When one is under the spell professing his or her love to the non-hypnotized character, it makes the non-hypnotized one start to see the other person in a whole new light.
The film features very good performances all around and the dialogue was good, but not great. Woody stays very true to the time period and is so specific at times, that I think it hurts the film slightly. Some of the dialogue may have worked in the 40's but today it's a bit stale. Overall though, I thought the script was very good and made for a very entertaining ride.
As for Woody, well, he's looking a little long in the tooth these days... but in retrospect, a lot of the comedy comes out of just that. He's not your typical leading man and when Charlize comes on to Woody, it's hilarious. I can't stress how amazing Charlize is in this. She just grabs hold of the screen and doesn't let go.
As far as where I would rank this, I would put it right there with Bullets Over Broadway and Manhattan Murder Mystery. This isn't Crimes and Misdemeanors or Annie Hall... but it's a funny movie that's beautiful to look at. If you're a Woody fan, like I am, you'll have a good time at this one.
Fred Mertz
