Match Point: Rotten TomatoesI am a sheep. Really. I don't really like the work of Woody Allen. I probably think he should resolve his issues in therapy rather than on the big screen. But I get suckered. Truth be told, I have really liked only two Allen films, Sleeper and Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex, and appreciate what's going on in a third, Annie Hall. But, you get conned. Sometimes, the marketing of the film is so sharp, I have to go. It's been a while since I've been fooled by a good trailer for a bad movie (I go and see bad movies regularly, but I understand what I'm in for), but it happens. Sometimes the marketing is so ubiquitous that you cannot ignore the film, perhaps fearing that I'm gonna be left out of the cultural zeitgeist. I've largely stopped caring about losing a bit of our shared language. I think the Matrix was the one the did that to me.
Sometimes, it's the critics. This is usually what gets me, though I think I'm starting to wise up to this racket.
Rotten Tomatoes is a neat tool. It's a meta-critique site, that offers snippets of a LARGE sample of reviews. I suppose this is part of the "
Wisdom of Crowds" movement. With 150 reviews, you can make a pretty good approximation of what the true mark of a movies is. Or, you can figure what the baseline biases are for the critical community are. I think that's what happened with Match Point, which has a 79% positive rating, with an average of 7.3 out of 10.
Match Point is not a horrible movie. It is a largely boring, frequently repetitive movie, with a plot twist that wasn't really that unpredictable. I suppose it was unpredictable in a Woody Allen film, but I leaned over and told my wife about what was coming an hour before it happened, and I had it doped out before I told her. But that's not the big problem with this movie.
Our Hero, a former b-level tennis star has no direction in life, other than he doesn't want to be a tennis star and he doesn't want to be a tennis teacher for life. He meets some rich people and just when you think he might be gay, he hits it off with his rich friend's sister. As that's developing, he develops a crush on his rich friend's fiancee. He gets in deeper with the sister and eventually hooks up with the fiancee. He gets in at dad's company, gets a nice lifestyle, gets married. Fiancee leaves the picture for a while. Wife is crazy about getting knocked up. I was vaguely reminded of the "Fill Me" scene in "Election". At this time, the fiancee reenters the picture, freed from fiancee-dom. So, they hook up like mad. Passionate sex with the American blond sex pot at every available moment, then dull mechanical sex with wifey at home. Ex-Fiancee nags him to leave wifey (in maybe seven scenes which were all roughly the same scene). Our "hero" can't get to it, largely because he's got a lifestyle to which he became accustomed. So, he talks to everyone he knows or doesn't, depending on whether they will tell his wife or not. Eventually, ex-fiancee gets knocked up (oh the irony) and goes batshit (technical term that). The flick drones on for a while (recurring theme, that) and eventually our hero decides what to do and takes a very long time doing it. The moral of the story turns out that it's better to be lucky than good, but that's murky and a little icky, particularly as our hero coolly explains his actions in a scene that is part Greek Tragedy, part Calvin Klein Obsession ad, part Ru-On, and all bad. Thankfully, the movie only has ten minutes after that, but I haven't been this bored or uninterested in a while.
A.O. Scott notes in the featured box on Tomatoes that it's Allen's most satisfying film more than ten years. I concur. Mostly because Allen has been junk for most of that time. Sweet and Lowdown (1999) was the last one I thought was satisfying. But we are talking a pretty low bar here, with most satisfying in the last ten years. That's the same deal as suggesting that Star Wars 3, Revenge of the Sith was the best Star Wars flick of the last 20 years. It was, but Star Wars was dormant and then crap during those 20 years. Just because it was the best of a bad lot doesn't mean it's good. And that's what's going on with the great reviews of Match Point. Allen has lowered the bar so far that when he makes a movie that isn't completely awful, it must be brilliant. At least it is compared to his other junk of the last decade.
