You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger - review

There were supposed to be three profound moments, I think, in Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. The first one when the writer, Roy, finds out that his friend is not dead but in a coma, the second when Naomi Watts realizes that she might have had a chance to have an affair with her boss, Antonio Banderas, if she had only made the right move at the right split of a moment, and the third and final, when Naomi Watts realizes that her own creation (her mother’s belief in a fortune-teller) has turned against her (when mother refuses her the loan because the psychic said the planets forbid it-- that's a spoiler btw. But it was just so predictable). All three were supposed to have that slight subtlety of Match Point, of tiny yet breath-taking moments—Chris Wilton‘s realization at night that he has to kill Scarlett Johansson; the flying ring bouncing off a ramp instead of falling into the river. But the first one was ridiculously predictable and cliché, the second one came out almost unnoticeable, and the third one somehow lacks an impact, for reasons I can’t quite pin down. There was also a vague theme of life being impossible to predict (a general joke involving the character of the fortune teller), thrown at a viewer in conclusion of the movie by the annoying and, for the most part, completely redundant voice-over. That also misfired and left me as a viewer empty-handed.

Overall, it doesn't take a fortune teller's skills to predict most of the twists of the movie. People who look for something better are punished by not finding it, relationships with gold diggers end up in unwanted pregnancies, plagiarism will be punished and good looking tall dark strangers always end up having an affair with your best girlfriend.

But Anthony Hopkins lost a lot of weight since The Wolfman.