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The Curse of the Jade Scorpion review
:. Director: Woody Allen
:. Starring: John Tormey, Woody Allen
:. Running Time: 1:30
:. Year: 2001
:. Country: USA
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As someone who feels somewhat cheated by the last few Woody Allen films, I didn't have high expectations of The Curse of the Jade Scorpion other than a few laughs. Celebrity, Small Time Crooks, and Deconstructing Harry started out well enough and then inexplicably veered off the path and lost me. Not so with The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, a charming ode (Woody Allen style) to 1940's New York that stays on track until the finish.
Woody Allen is C.W. Briggs, a successful though beleaguered insurance company investigator who's been hypnotized to break into the very homes he has secured. The hypnotist, Voltan (David Ogden Stiers), not only has him breaking into homes of the rich and stealing their jewels, he's has him fall in love with his nemesis coworker, the efficient Betty Ann Fitzgerald (Helen Hunt), also under the hypnotist's.
What follows are the usual laughs expected when the audience is in on something that someone so clearly unprepared as C.W. Briggs is not. Slumped over and trudging along all the while professing to be something of a ladykiller, Allen is a treat to watch. His jokes are typical and illicit several chuckles. To watch him shift from paranoid insurance man to hypnotized slave is better than most of the crap dished out this summer.
Lots of time is spent watching Allen and Hunt together onscreen and aside from some clever barbs in the dialogue, Hunt is rather unremarkable. She doesn't possess the spark to match Allen's wit and tends to drone on. She drinks just as much as she did in Pay It Forward. Perhaps a detox movie is in her horizon?
Casting is mixed and at times truly puzzling. Charlize Theron deserves special mention as usual. As in Celebrity, she steals the show with her energy. Here she plays a vampy debutante whose advances are shunned by Allen when he is summoned by the hypnotist to steal again. It's really just a matter of time before she takes over. Dan Akroyd is more than a bit of a bore as Magruder, Allen's boss, though he does make a good match for Hunt.
At the end of the day, Allen's humor prevails and the film wraps up almost too nicely. On a final note, Theron and Allen really should have gotten together.
Anji Milanovic
 Movie Reviews: from 1998 to 2011
Movie Reviews: from 2012 to present
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