You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)

Genre

Comedy | Drama | Romance

Director

Woody Allen

Country

USA | Spain

Cast

Antonio Banderas, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins, Gemma Jones, Freida Pinto, Lucy Punch, Naomi Watts, Roger Ashton-Griffiths, Ewen Bremmer, Neil Jackson, Celia Imrie, Pauline Collins, Anna Friel, Alex MacQueen, Meera Syal, Anupam Kher, Natalie Walter, Christian McKay, Philip Glenister, Theo James

Storyline

After Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) leaves Helena (Gemma Jones) to pursue his lost youth, Helena abandons rationality and surrenders her life to the loopy advice of a charlatan fortune teller (Pauline Collins). Meanwhile their daughter Sally (Naomi Watts) develops a crush on her boss (Antonio Banderas) and her husband (Josh Brolin) becomes moonstruck over a mystery woman (Freida Pinto).

Opinion

After a brief staying in New York City with "Whatever Works", Woody Allen probably thought that Europe worked better, so he went back to England, the land of three great films of him. What he did was proving it wasn't the country to bring him luck. Making it short, "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger" is a tedious, pointless dramedy.

Sex problems, unsuccessful writers and people in general, jokes about religion and spirituality, and psychoanalysis are most of Allen's recurring themes. Knowing that, one would have expected to see all those topics again, and/or maybe a leap in quality.

What he did instead was writing a terrible, boring story about a bunch of unhappy people, all trying to find love - in hopeless places, if I may add - that is somehow the same story of "Whatever Works". Only this time it goes on and on and on until it's over, and the film leaves you waiting for a twist, or anything interesting to happen. But nothing ever happens. Unless you consider ridiculing cartomancy and spirituality something. 

Another problem are the character. Other than being completely superficial, and showing no signs of depth, none of the character is likeable nor interesting and some of them having an utterly annoying storyline, like the romantic sub-plot involving Naomi Watt's character and the one involving Gemma Jones's character. 

Now the film's genre. It's a dramedy, but while there's definitely a lot of drama, the film is short in comedy. There are some funny lines, but that's it. Some of Allen's hilarious humour would have definitely helped here, especially to forget about the story that isn't going anywhere and bland characters.

However, the first class cast does a quite good job. I'm not saying the film is worth watching though. And trust me, I've seen it twice and my opinion hasn't changed.