The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (12A)

The curse of self-delusion

Time was when "the new Woody Allen" marked a red-letter day in the movie calendar. Time hasn't changed the familiar template of a white-on-black title sequence and scratchy Dixieland jazz tootling away in the background, but even diehard Allen nuts can no longer delude themselves about their hero: his talent is in eclipse, and his best work is way behind him. The distributors appear to have realised this too, for The Curse of The Jade Scorpion has been awaiting a British release for more than a year, snarled in contractual toils. A Curse indeed.

Is it worth the wait? That will mostly depend on two things, the first of them a liking for period pastiche with a whimsical B-movie flavour. The period in question is 1940, an era Allen has used to good advantage in movies as diverse as The Purple Rose of Cairo, Bullets Over Broadway and, most recently, Sweet and Lowdown. This time around Allen himself stars as CW Briggs, a down-at-heel Manhattan insurance investigator who works on instinct, gleaning tips from street bums and blind beggars to track down the guilty.

Now these quaint methods of detection are under threat from a brisk new broom named Betty Ann Fitzgerald (Helen Hunt), who is contracting the firm's work to outsiders in her push for efficiency. Soon enough CW and "Fitz" are at daggers drawn, trading insults in mock-period circumlocution – he thinks she's a ball-breaker, she calls him a "wormy little ferret" and "a snoopy little termite".

And on it goes. And on. And on. The picture is almost over and they're still at it, declaiming how they can't stand one another and wishing the other would fall under a bus and – would you believe it? – it becomes very tiresome. It's meant to sound like Bogart and Bacall, or Grant and Hepburn, but there's no comic snap to their fencing, and what's more we're tipped the wink early on that their hostility is a front: they actually adore one another. This is first suggested at an office night out when a hypnotist, the mysterious and moustachioed Voltan (David Ogden Stiers), puts CW and Fitz in a trance on stage; to the crowd's delight the pair exchange woozy but passionate declarations of love.

And there's the second hinge on which hangs your enjoyment of the movie – not the idea of hypnosis unmasking our true selves, nor even the convoluted intricacies of the daft dime-novel plot, but the fact that Woody Allen thinks he can still cut it as a romantic lead. Thirty years ago in Play It Again, Sam, Allen dreamed of himself as Bogart, from the noble trench-coated solitude right down to that teeth-baring twitch. It didn't matter that he looked more like Peter Lorre, that was part of the joke, and in any case he was so funny and self-deprecating that you could see how someone like Diane Keaton would fall for him. But now Allen is in his mid-sixties, and looks it, while the women he chases on screen are young enough to be Diane Keaton's daughters.

Hunt isn't the only romantic interest here; the coltish Elizabeth Berkley plays the office beauty CW ogles, and ex-model Charlize Theron plays a naughty-girl heiress with a Veronica Lake hairdo who turns up uninvited at CW's apartment and climbs into his bed (the evening is interrupted, thank heavens, before anything gets going). Nothing to make you go "eeew" like the moment he kisses Julia Roberts in Everyone Says I Love You, but the self-delusion remains alarming.

All the same, after a feeble opening half-hour, Jade Scorpion induces an agreeable trance of its own. The Art Deco interiors and gleaming Packards of Santo Loquasto's production design look great, and Zhao Fei's photography bathes everything in a yolky, autumnal light. Even the screenplay picks up a little, and the laughs begin to come, if not at a flow, then a steady trickle. When informed by the vampish Theron that she usually prefers tall, well-built guys, Allen considers his weedy frame: "Maybe I could do a few push-ups before you come over." Later, the firm's boss (Dan Aykroyd) tells a nervy CW, "There's a word for people who think everyone's plotting against them".

"Yes – perceptive," CW replies. The plot, which depends on CW and Fitz suspecting each other as culprit in a series of audacious jewel robberies, awkwardly engineers a surprise meeting between the two of them in Fitz's bedroom. "What – you've been hiding here all evening?" she asks, aghast. "No, I was just passing through," he assures her. Not vintage material, but proof at least that Allen's comic instincts haven't altogether seized up.

The difference between the conceit of this film and that which drove, say, The Purple Rose of Cairo, isn't merely a difference in ingenuity; it's to do with a sureness of touch. In Purple Rose of Cairo, matinee idol Jeff Daniels stepped down off the screen into the life of downtrodden Mia Farrow, and Allen made of it a bizarre, funny and affecting romance.

In Jade Scorpion the gimmick revolves around a hypnotist who mesmerises his charges into committing burglaries on his behalf, an idea Allen would once have squeezed for its comic juices but here makes the central joist of the plot. It holds up, but the sense of strain is palpable. Perhaps, like me, you will the movie along, because it's difficult to accept that an artist who once meant so much can now mean so little.

The Curse of The Jade Scorpion won't ruin anyone's day, for sure, but what a pale concession that is to a man we took for granted as a comic genius.