Were it anyone other than Woody Allen you'd be mildly impressed. But
the fact is, these characters are wooden and merely instrumental to a
bloodless story. You know he's been in command of the real
incandesence of life as a filmmaker, but here is threadbare and
functional. Revisiting Crimes and Misdemeanors in certain ways with
more rigor, but mostly with less involvement. It's a Henry Kissinger-
esque realpolitik approach to story–to use an outlandish
metaphor…atoms impacting atoms, a certain serviceable mimicry of
life emerging from a playbook on strategy. The twist about the ring
and bannister analogous to the net ball was very clever, though.