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88Seemingly a simple comedy, it actually -- like all Allen's "simple" comedies -- has a lot to say. Will the audience listen or just dismiss it as minor, out-of-date Woody? If they do, it's their loss.
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88Woody Allen's most purely entertaining film in years.
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80Allen's good with the material, but Hunt sparkles, repeatedly razoring her diminutive antagonist to shreds.
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80It's a real charmer from a director who feels that a knockabout romantic farce doesn't have to be mindless -- take that, "America's Sweethearts."
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80A thoroughly likable, if familiar, Woody Allen comedy -- not the most original or revealing tintype in the director's gallery, perhaps, but blessedly free of the self-conscious hand-wringing and tortured navel-gazing that impede the former Mr. Konigsberg's more sluggish efforts.
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80One thing I especially like about it, apart from the flavorsome 40s decor in color, is that it's silly in much the same way that many small 40s comedies were.
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75Hardly the first of Woody Allen's love letters to the good old days, but it's a high-spirited, entertaining one, falling along the same lines as "Radio Days."
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75There's nothing major here, certainly nothing on the order of my favorite among Allen's retro workouts of the past decade, ''Bullets Over Broadway.'' But it's entertaining all the same.
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70Certainly not a piffle, nor an impressive departure into a new filmmaking realm, Allen's second film in a row about crooks ranks in the middle range of his work.
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63Never quite lifts off. The elements are here, but not the magic.
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63Since a goodly portion of Jade is given over to the barbed banter lobbed by Allen and a solid Helen Hunt (in Stanwyck mode as a peevish efficiency expert who challenges his façade of male superiority), Woody the wordsmith is in full evidence, too.
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60This charming and funny film may be one of the last of a rare genre deservedly named after a person -- the Woody Allen movie.
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60The problem is that Allen is getting a bit long in the tooth to be playing a romancer-rescuer, and since he and Helen Hunt have a rather frigid actorly rapport, we have plenty of time to notice the awkward, and barely acknowledged, disparity in their ages.
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60It would be dishonest to deny that Jade Scorpion has amusing moments, but it never gets better than that and often settles for less.
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60A loose- jointed, not especially memorable comic caper with some lovely moments of humorous invention, many patches of clumsy writing and a few game performances.
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58This one is for Woody fans, and maybe Woody fans only.
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58So lame and Woody himself seems so worn down and the humor is such a pale shadow of the former Allen brilliance that -- despite a few chuckles here and there -- it's a considerable disappointment.
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50There are lots of plot twists and romantic angles. What's lacking is laughs.
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50Lightweight, inoffensive fare, as bland as a sleepwalker under a hypnotist's spell.
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50It's not fresh and irreverent, qualities we admire in Allen. It is recycled and irrelevant.
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50It's middling Allen, which means that fans won't be sorry to see it, while everyone else can wait until the next "Bullets Over Broadway."
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It feels wrong; the entire machinery of the movie seems to be rotating around Woody Allen's vanity. He remains a canny (if, in this case, hollow) film craftsman, but by now we know him far too well to be asked to find him adorable.
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50Nothing but plot and production values, and there's barely a laugh in it that isn't quashed.
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50This mid-level, pretty-but-not-hugely-funny Allen film slips into the top spot by regretful default. I enjoyed every single second of it, a little bit.
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40Scorpion fails to connect on anything but the most basic comic level. Despite Allen's usual excellent direction, it all plays like a TV-movie version of something else, Allen-lite.
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40It's evidently important to Allen to work, work, work, but he's starting to make his movies by rote instead of passion. Could he handle -- psychologically -- a year or two off? Could he afford -- creatively -- to keep grinding them out?
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40The movie isn't terrible -- a few clever notions snap to life and pay off, at least modestly -- but it's dispirited and eventually dispiriting, a force-fed farce that falls far short of fascination.
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40Despite an appealing, even ingenious premise, "Scorpion" is another quippy but uninspired comedy.
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30Although there's no evidence of sexual chemistry on the screen, the stars share a certain physical defensiveness that occasionally makes them seem simpatico; most of the time, however, they just look bored to death.
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25The problem with Allen's latest, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, is "Not enough Double Indemnity."
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20Achieves a generic period look, but there's nothing lived-in about its rooms, nothing persuasive or necessary about its time and place -- there's no longer even a movie fan's nostalgia to give it some spark, or a reason for being.