It’s time for an old fashioned murder mystery. The film is a comedy first and foremost but does still manage to have a body count here. The writing could use a lot of work though and the film suffers from all the usual issues of a Woody Allen film. Namely that the dialogue is laughable at best and the characters are quite weak but at least the case itself is pretty interesting.

The film starts off with Larry and Carol returning home and chatting with their neighbors. Larry finds the whole experience to be painful but Carol doesn’t want to be rude. It turns out that would be the last time they see one neighbor as she died of a heart attack. The husband is taking this as well as can be expected…perhaps too well. Carol believes that he murdered his wife and now she wants to investigate the whole thing. Larry doesn’t really want to entertain this but has no way of stopping Carol. Meanwhile both of them are being pursued by would be suitors who don’t care about their married status. Can Larry and Carol stay strong here?

So right away the film does lose out on the technical elements. The writing only succeeds in making the characters as annoying as possible. The general plot about the murder mystery is solid enough but technically tends to be more of a backdrop. I do appreciate that it gives the film more of a plot in general though as a lot of the other Allen films just tend to be rather aimless. This one also does deliver with a pretty solid climax.

The strongest part of the film is the climax which homages the James Bond film with the Golden Gun. The shootout is solid and definitely more action packed than you may have expected. There is also no real cop out at the end so it’s not like the adventure was a bad dream or anything like that. I was half expecting the film to have some crazy explanation to distance itself from the story. Not a dream but something along those lines that would have resulted in a ton of misunderstandings. After all the film is always trying to go for a certain kind of realism that I ironically think makes it end up being less realistic because most people don’t act like these characters.

As for the characters, well lets start with the most desperate ones first. Marcia and Ted. So Marcia basically just wants some action so she tries to seduce Larry but is never able to get tough to him and settles for making Carol jealous by helping out with the murder mystery. While Larry never really faltered, I do think he needed to put more space between them. Keeping yourself in a tricky situation is always a recipe for disaster.

Then we have Ted who is far worse than Marcia with how direct he is. He basically confesses to Carol in the film aside from all the obvious hintings. This guy just has no class and honestly she needed to remove him as a friend. It’s one thing to have a friend who may like you deep down but one who is this upfront about it? That’s trouble and for that reason all of the scenes make Carol look extra bad as well.

Carol even goes as far as to try and make Larry jealous about this with how she keeps comparing his lack of enthusiasm in the mystery to how Ted is jumping at every opportunity. That basically forces Larry to have to get more involved when he knows that this is a bad idea. Also since the lady is dead, the situation is different than if they thought he had kidnapped someone. In that case then you have to act even without evidence.

Larry does still tend to get the funniest scenes of the film but his jokes still miss more than they land. I just enjoy the nervous, fast talking kind of humor that he has. With good writing then the film would probably be in a pretty good spot. Larry’s take on the situation is certainly more rational than the others. He has a point that heart attacks can happen for any number of reasons and jumping to murder feels a bit drastic. Even the lying could easily be explained by the neighbor just not being comfortable enough around the main characters to spill his beans.

Now granted, everyone seems to love giving way too much information to each other in these films but this could have been an exception. A neighbor is far from being a friend or a member of the family after all. Perhaps I’m just being anti social here but I wouldn’t want my neighbors barging in with snacks and drinks to randomly start talking. Especially in the evening I’d be relaxing and playing video games by that point.

It sort of goes without saying that all of the “romance” in the film is pretty weak. I’m not even sure if you could call any of it romance. The main leads are married here even if they seem to just love taking pot shots at each other the whole time. The side characters seem to just want to claim victory but I couldn’t detect any true passion there at all. Finally with the neighbors things obviously didn’t turn out well by the end and there was some extra drama after a twist or two.

The characters end up being too easy and just try to enjoy the moment without thinking of the ramifications. These are characters who might be fun to hang out with in a very limited time frame but you could not trust them as friends at all. They will always be putting themselves into dicey situations that are absolutely going to lead to dangerous habits and tempting arenas for cheating. If you were to stick with them then you’d be doomed. In some ways I could see these films being interesting watches for people who are stuck in areas outside of civilization like posts in the Arctic. It would give you a really interesting view of society if you didn’t live in it.

Overall, This is definitely not going to be a winning film. Even though it has a bit more of a plot going on than some of the other Allen films it still ends up being more noise than anything else. The kind of film that you might have on in the background while you’re doing chores or something. The film still needs more of a central focus for me to ever even begin to start calling it a solid title. Throw in some good writing as well and then we have a chance. If you really love the Woody Allen films then this one is worth watching. At the very least it does try to have a serious climax and to the film’s credit it really does play this straight. That’s the only real piece of credit I can give to the movie though because otherwise there’s just a lot of nothing going around. You are really better off with many other slice of life type titles.

Overall 3/10