I think there are few directors working today who are as hit-or-miss as Woody Allen. The man gets a cherry of a deal from movie studios: in essence it reads “You get one film a year, it can be anything you want, we’ll put it out but financing is up to you”.

With such autonomy comes brilliance like MATCH POINT or VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA. And with such autonomy also comes a lot of crap.

YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER isn’t exactly crap…but it lands well short of brilliance too. The film is about a web of marital restlessness, with Sally (Naomi Watts) at its centre. Her parents feel dissatisfied and split up, her boss feels dissatisfied and strays, and even her husband feels an urge to stray.

All of this provides for wonderful setup. But the big flaw with TALL DARK STRANGER is that it never seems to take these stories very far. The moral of the story is understood very early on, and never expanded upon even though we are reminded of the lesson four or five times.

The film looks charming, an certainly has some moments of heartache…such as when we learn where Greg’s (Antonio Banderas) heart really lies…but most of the fables and chapters seem to stop a step short. Thus the film feels like taking a sighseeing tour of The Empire State Building and never taking the elevator up.

Amusingly, the film opens and closes with the song “When You Wish Upon a Star”…a song that contains the lyrics Like a bolt out of the blue / Fate steps in and sees you through. For the characters of STRANGER it doesn’t feel like fate is seeing them through anything. It feels like their own selfishness is forcing fate’s hand – and when that happens, the result doesn’t quite ‘see them through’ so much as it just ferries them to a different place of malcontent.

An interesting idea – but nothing memorable.

YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER opens this week in NY and LA