Anyway, I saw a sneak preview of the new Woody Allen film, Small Time Crooks. It's a throwaway piece of fluff, a lot closer to his slapsticky early work than to anything he's done recently, but it's a lot of fun. Allen plays a small-time crook who schemes with his wife (not his daughter, as you might think by looking at them) Frenchy (Tracy Ullmann) and his dim-bulb buddies to rob a bank. They hit it big, all right, but in a much different way than they expected. That's all I'll tell you, since that's all I knew going in.
Ullmann is terrific as a sort of update of the Judy Holliday character from Born Yesterday, with Hugh Grant doing his charming, suavely stammering thing as the Bill Holden character. Woody Allen is no Broderick Crawford, but at least he's less annoying than usual, and it's pretty funny to see him try to make his whiny kvetching menacing. Elaine May is hilarious as Frenchy's sweetly spacy cousin May, who's a couple burritos short of a combination platter. (Well, none of these folks are rocket scientists.)
It's a slight movie, a screwball mishmash of Born Yesterday, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Take the Money and Run, but Allen throws in a few plot twists here and there when things start to drag, enough to keep you on your toes. And it's funny. You could do a lot worse, but you wouldn't be kicking yourself if you missed it, either.
Back to homepage
Reviews A to F
Reviews G to L
Reviews M to R
Reviews S to Z
Search