Small-time Woody Allen, but that's not such a bad thing. Less pretension, lower pressure. It is of course impossible, after everything that has happened in the interim, both on screen and off it, for Allen to revert to the carefree spirit of his first directing effort, Take the Money and Run, though it is possible for him to revert to the genre. And it is something of a "stretch" (as they say), after the succession of writers, college professors, film directors, etc., that he has enacted in recent times, for him to take on a role so much farther removed from his public persona. Namely the role of a low-brow bumbling burglar, who refuses to believe that his nickname in prison -- The Brain -- was "sarcastic." We needn't trouble ourselves over whether, in dumbing down his own character, he hoped to recapture a broader audience, or at least to reassemble the nostalgists who haven't laughed at him since Sleeper. What instead ought to interest and impress us -- again after everything that's happened, on and off screen -- is how the sweet, buoyant, casual, relaxed, offhand quality of his acting here, as well as of his writing and his directing, signals a triumph of the "artist" in him. A triumph of the illusionist, the fictionist. With Tracey Ullman, Hugh Grant, Elaine May. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
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