Watching a Woody Allen film is always rewarding, and this one has the advantage of his re-casting with Diane Keaton, as well as Alan Alda. So there is no question but that it's worth a viewing for any Woody fan. But I would not rate it among his best, and maybe not even among his 'better' output. It gets off to a good start . . . let us say a typical Woody Allen start, and it runs along in characteristic Woody grooves of angst and self-demeanment (one knows what to expect from Woody), but along about two-thirds through the film it suddenly gets unrealistically kooky, seeming to shift, at that point, from the calculated and well-paced humor into a kind of frenetic intensity of faux detective action with the characters suddenly OUT of character and doing things that had no reasonable basis in the earlier buildup of the tale. Seriously, I felt it came across like a schizophrenic directorial job, which of course has to be laid at the feet of Allen, himself. Thumbs not exactly down on this one, but leaning quite heavily toward the horizontal.
Review of Manhattan Murder Mystery
