The Woodman's return to New York after a four-year European sojourn finds him working very familiar territory much less fruitfully than in the past.
4 Comments
04/24/09
Whatever Works (2009)
47
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:124
Fresh:58
Rotten:66
Average Rating:5.3/10
Consensus: Based upon a script written in the 1970s, Woody Allen's Whatever Works suffers from a lack of fresh ideas.
Theatrical Release:Jun 19, 2009 Limited
Box Office: $5,183,644
Synopsis: The New York-based humor of Woody Allen and CURB YOUR ENTHUSIAM’s Larry David seems like a natural match, and the pair unite for the first time in this comedy. WHATEVER WORKS follows a rich man... [More]
Starring: Larry David, Evan Rachel Wood, Patricia Clarkson, Ed Begley
Director: Woody Allen
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Reviews for Whatever Works
Top CriticWhatever Works makes more of a demand on a viewer's willingness to suspend disbelief than movies about vampires or giant robots.
07/03/09
Larry David is the mind of the enterprise, and Evan Rachel Wood is the heart.
06/25/09
Top CriticTen years after his great expectoration of bile in Deconstructing Harry, Woody Allen comes up with Whatever Works -- the most shameless, cynically titled Hollywood con job since the days of Billy Wilder.
06/17/09
Evidence that Woody Allen's return to making films in America--it's his first since 2004 ("Melinda and Melinda")--comes with the loss of his mind.
06/11/09
Whatever Works does not: Marking a return to Allen's favorite turf, his new Manhattan-based comedy rehashes old ideas and jokes, and casting Larry David in a role that decades ago Allen could have played with his eyes closed adds no freshness either.
04/26/09
30 years after he wrote and shelved this script, the conceptual creakiness of Whatever Works might have been redeemed only by the director in the starring role.
07/03/09
Unlike last year’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which felt fresh and contemporary, Whatever Works seems dated. Allen has covered these themes so often that they provide few surprises.
07/03/09
Though stuffed with witty one-liners and wondrously convoluted tirades, this far-fetched, deliberately artificial game of musical chairs...feels forced, often losing itself in excess verbiage.
04/24/09
The result is a witty, well-played work without an adequate center. If you can get past that, Whatever Works does.
07/03/09
This toxic, contemptuous, unforgivably unfunny bagatelle finds Allen at his most misanthropically one-note.
07/02/09
Whatever Works isn't topnotch Woody Allen, but it's still immensely funny.
07/03/09
In small doses, [David] turns the narcissistic jerk into a hipster. But as an actor he has no equipment for suggesting a conflicted inner life: It’s all just straight to the camera, uninflected bombast.
06/08/09
Top Critic[It] goes from burned-out Allen motif to a mannered dinner theater production in little less than 10 minutes. And it stays there.
07/06/09
While Allen's screenplay features plenty of amusing one-liners...its tired handling of so many overly familiar themes eventually proves enervating.
04/24/09
This acidic, patronizing and painfully unfunny comedy nearly undoes all the good will that the veteran screenwriter/director had recouped with his later-period, Europe-bound mysteries and dramas.
07/03/09
Woody Allen is infuriating. He has created some of the most radical and important comedy of all time. But Woody Allen is old and he is lazy and he just doesn't care.
08/11/09
The fact that Allen wrote the script in the '70s explains something about why his newest movie feels so old.
06/17/09
Top CriticWhatever Works isn't deep, but with Grandpa Woody, you accept the warmed over, the recycled, just relieved he hasn't made a spectacle of himself.
07/03/09
David and Allen seem to be straining to create caricatures of the other's screen persona - and the results are inevitably self-negating, a comedic black hole from which not even laughter can escape.
07/10/09
Latest News for Whatever Works
June 18, 2009:
Critics Consensus: Year One Fails To Beget Laughs
This week at the movies, we've got Biblical bloopers (Year One, starring Jack Black and Michael Cera) and an engagement of convenience (The Proposal, starring Sandra Bullock and... More...
May 10, 2009:
Trailer Bulletin: Whatever Works 
Larry David steps in as Woody Allen's latest on-screen surrogate in "Whatever Works," due out June 19. Watch the trailer now! More...
May 10, 2009:
Trailer & Poster review
More...
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