The Curse of the Jade Scorpion Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)August 25th, 2001
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
THE CURSE OF THE JADE SCORPION
Written and Directed by Woody Allen
With Woody Allen, Helen Hunt
Theater PG-13 103 min.
Don't expect brilliance every time from Woody Allen.. With the exception of a few masterpieces like Annie Hall and Manhattan, what Woody makes is movies -- funny movies, entertaining movies, sometimes very good movies, movies that earn their claim on our ticket dollars and a few hours of our time. He’s established a persona who checks in with different names and occupations but the same neuroses and mannerisms in one dependable movie a year. He makes movies in the tradition of Bob Hope, or Charlie Chan.
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion is a B movie made with A movie talent. The period production design by longtime collaborator Santo Loquasto is stunning, the cinematography by recent Allen acquisition Zhao Fei is rich and satisfying, the cast, from Oscar-winner Helen Hunt on down is excellent. Curiously, Hunt is often unflatteringly lit – perhaps in an effort to narrow the 28-year generation gap between her and her romantic lead. Among the richness of characters and performances, Charlize Theron is a knockout as a Bad Rich Girl.
Allen’s direction is uneven. He gets great work out of his cast, but his pacing is off – there’s plenty of down time to read the EXIT signs and count the change in your pocket. His screenplay could have used a few more laps around the word processor. It’s packed with gags, some of them funny, some of them not (a mix Allen may recognize – he has Hunt’s character describe him as “a little man who makes bad jokes.”). The plot has a retread familiarity, and its twists and turns are just not as clever as they ought to be. On the other hand, it’s not bad. It passes the time in an amusing way. It’s comfortable.
In a way, Scorpion’s B-movieness dovetails nicely with its setting. The time is 1940, the place of course is Manhattan, and the deal is this: Woody is C.W. Briggs, an investigator for a big insurance firm run by the affable Magruder (Dan Aykroyd). Briggs is an old-school guy, who gathers tips from his informer network of blind beggars and street riff-raff, hits on the office secretaries, hangs out in the neighborhood bar, and solves cases by the seat of his pants. “I get inside the criminal mind,” he tells his admiring co-workers. “I wouldn’t want to have me after me.”
It’s a world that should go on forever, but a serpent has invaded his Garden. She’s an efficiency expert, Miss FitzGerald (Helen Hunt), and she’s messing with the old ways of doing things. Briggs and FitzGerald get along like Arafat and Sharon. In the world of a movie, no two people who hate each other that much could be headed anywhere but romance.
The fulcrum on which Allen’s plot turns is a scene with a nightclub hypnotist (David Ogden Stiers). From there the plot marches inexorably and inevitably – one might even say familiarly – to its conclusion. Echoes of movies past haunt the frames of Scorpion. You’ll recognize bits of The Court Jester, The Manchurian Candidate, even The Woman in the Window, and others that nibble at the fringes of memory. These days we call that sort of thing homage, a stream Allen fished for his previous (and most commercially successful) movie, the Big Deal on Madonna Street-flavored Small Time Crooks.
For my money, Allen’s best movie in recent years is the hilarious and smartly original Bullets Over Broadway. He used a surrogate actor (John Cusack) to star, and more importantly, he worked with a collaborator (Douglas McGrath) on the script. It’s a formula worth revisiting.
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