Woody Allen's latest offering is purportedly a romantic comedy but it lacks the most essential element for the genre - chemistry between the two leads.
Colin Firth and Emma Stone are perfectly charming and amusing in the leading roles, but is the audience rooting for them to get together? Probably not.
Firth plays master magician Stanley Crawford - a caustic, ill-tempered, ruthlessly logical man who wows the world as conjurer Wei Ling Soo. As a sideline, he also takes great pleasure in exposing professed mystics and mediums as fakes. Enter Stone's Sophie Baker - a pretty young thing from a small town in America who is famed for her supernatural prowess.
Her clairvoyant powers are the talk of the French Riviera, where she has been invited by Grace Catledge (Jacki Weaver), the matriarch of a wealthy family, to communicate with her late husband via séances.
Stanley is persuaded by his loyal friend, and fellow magician Howard (Simon McBurney) to come to the Catledge's lush Cote D'Azur mansion to try and unveil Sophie as a phony.
In the process, he becomes increasingly dumbfounded by her seemingly impossible feats of clairvoyance and begins to soften his strictly rational view of the world.
Is she a real mystic? Is he falling in love with her? Do you care?
The wonderfully captured setting of the south of France, sumptuous costumes and jaunty jazz soundtrack make for pleasant viewing, but can't save the paper-thin plot, contrived concept and utter lack of chemistry.
It's a largely forgettable mis-step in Woody Allen's distinguished, but patchy, canon.
Sarah McIntyre
