CURSE OF THE JADE SCORPION
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
CAPSULE: This film is more interesting for its nostalgia value than for actual story values. That value is certainly better than any comic value it might have. Woody Allen writes, directs, and stars in a whimsical B film of a style that was popular in the year it is set, 1940. Allen's humor just is not as funny as it used to be. This is better than some of his recent efforts, but that is not saying much. Rating: 4 (0 to 10), 0 (-4 to +4).
As far as I am concerned Woody Allen, once one of our finest filmmakers, has not made a really satisfying film since his excellent CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS. CURSE OF THE JADE SCORPION is his best effort in recent times. At least he is not obviously trying to write about his life, as he was in DECONSTRUCTING HARRY. There are not missing scenes, as there were in SWEET AND LOWDOWN. He does get the feel of the genre of film he is resurrecting, unlike EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU. Here he tells a whole story and it feels right (mostly). The one problem is that it is not a really good story. It has plot holes and the plot might very well have been used for a 1930s or 1940s B picture. It probably would not have had a lurid, pulpish title like CURSE OF THE JADE SCORPION. In filmdom those titles were pretty much confined to the serials at that time. And this film is in color, albeit sepia-tinged, and is a little more explicit about sex than one of those films would have been. But those exceptions aside this might well have been a film that might have starred Lee Tracy and nestled at the bottom of a double bill right under a big Warner Brothers studio film. If that was what Allen was trying to recreate, that does not make this a particularly ambitious film, but it probably achieves those ambitions. Even the comedy is up to the standards of that sort of film.
C.W. Briggs (Woody Allen) is a super-hot-shot investigator for the North Coast Insurance Company. (Does the U.S. have a north coast?) He gets all the big cases and breaks them with lightning speed with the aid of his network of skid row informants. He has just broken a tough case of a stolen Picasso. Everybody in the office is agog but for the insurance company's executive efficiency expert Betty Ann Fitzgerald (Helen Hunt). Fitz, as she is called, has absolutely no use for smug, self-obsessed, egotistical Briggs, and Briggs has no use for the officious Fitz who can match him insult for insult in battles of double entendres. One night the two go with a group to see a nightclub hypnotist, Voltan (David Ogden Stiers). When called up to the stage neither thinks that Voltan can put them under. He does and temporarily makes them love each other. He also leaves them with post-hypnotic suggestion that makes them his slave when he uses the right code word (a la THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE). He has plans of his own for them.
This is, of course, not Allen's first outing into nostalgia for the world of the popular culture of his youth. His most successful film along these lines would probably be RADIO DAYS. There he showed how the entertainment world and his own real world interacted and fed each other. There is no such attempt here. His script is pure pastiche. His humor is more than a little strained and for me at least was just not funny. At one point he tells police that he cannot talk to them because he has a chorus girl in his bedroom. An instant later he tells them he has to get back to his nurse. When they remind him that he just said she was a chorus girl, flustered he says it is a chorus girl who does a little nursing. The line is very Woody Allen, but it is not at all clever or funny. The film is just full of predictable twists and gags that do not quite amuse.
In this film Allen is looking a little tired and bedraggled. He continues to cast himself as the romantic lead in his films. The heart wants what the heart wants, and the heart no longer yearns to see him get a woman twenty-eight years his junior. It seemed only recently that Helen Hunt was in several films released at the same time. Now she is content to be in just Allen's film. Allen, like Robert Altman, is in the enviable position that he can put a familiar face in just about every major role. This film has Dan Aykroyd, Wallace Shawn, David Ogden Stiers and Charlize Theron. One can tell from the beginning that this is a Woody Allen film. Every Allen film these days starts with a jazz score and white on black credits.
CURSE OF THE JADE SCORPION is whimsical, but it is empty and rarely elicits a laugh. I give it a 4 on the 0 to 10 scale and a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Copyright 2001 Mark R. Leeper