Woody Allen has been trying to make a comeback in recent years.
Small Time Crooks was moderately fun, and
The
Curse of the Jade Scorpion had style written all over it. So on an upward climb, he ventured into an area he should know well - the movies - and failed miserably.
Hollywood Ending has mass potential but no content, and it just goes on and on without allowing the audience to as much as whimper a laugh.
Allen stars as an aging and out-of-work director who is picked up to do a major new motion picture by a studio executive, who is romantically involved with Allen''s ex-wife. Allen agrees to do the picture only because he needs a comeback film (does this sound familiar?), but something goes wrong; on the first day of shooting, psychological stress causes him to go blind. Of course, if he announces this, he''ll never get hired again, so he continues to direct, despite being able to see nothing at all. Comedy is supposed to ensue.
The problem with Hollywood Ending is that it ordinary. It is so ordinary it is horrible. The movie goes from one comical situation to the next, but never extracts any kind of humor from those situations. The fact that he is blind through half the film could lead to some hilarious incidents and so forth, but Allen (who also wrote and directed) resorts mainly to stagehands asking him which object he would prefer, and he blindly says, "That one," leaving the stagehand to frantically guess which one he means.