Small Time Crooks (2000)

Woody Allen's 2000 crime comedy concerns Ray Winkler, an ex-convict who leases a shuttered pizzeria, assembles three hapless accomplices, and digs a tunnel toward a bank vault while his wife Frenchy sells cookies upstairs as cover. The tunnel collapses. The cookies do not. Within a year the couple are millionaires, franchising dough across the eastern seaboard, and the film shifts from heist picture to a study of a marriage buckling under sudden money. The plot bears a family resemblance to Larceny, Inc., a fact Allen has never bothered to confirm or deny, and the whole enterprise carries the loose, shrugging rhythm of a man who has made this kind of picture before and will make it again.

Where a social conscience briefly flickers is in the film's treatment of class. Frenchy, played by Tracey Ullman with a broad outer-borough gusto, throws a dinner party in her new luxury apartment and overhears the guests mocking her taste. She hires an art dealer, Hugh Grant at his most silken, to instruct her in the refinements of the upper class. The comedy here aims its barbs at nouveau riche pretension and old-money condescension alike, and it lands a few. But this is satire of manners, not of systems. The rich are ridiculous. The rich remain rich. Nobody storms a yacht.

The ledger beyond that is thin. The cast is uniformly white. There are no queer characters, no engagement with race, no environmental concern, no body positivity, no neurodivergence, no revision of history, no feminist argument, and no lecture. Frenchy is a vivid presence, though the film has no interest in critiquing the order that undervalues her. That leaves a modest, amiable comedy which wants nothing more than to amuse, and mostly does.

This is a picture content to tell jokes about money and marriage, and it asks nothing of the audience beyond a willingness to laugh. There is no sermon in it, no cause, no instruction on how to live. For those keeping cultural scorecards, the page stays blank. For everyone else, it is a pleasant way to spend ninety minutes, which is more than most films of its vintage can honestly claim.

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{"review": "Woody Allen's 2000 crime comedy concerns Ray Winkler, an ex-convict who leases a shuttered pizzeria, assembles three hapless accomplices, and digs a tunnel toward a bank vault while his wife Frenchy sells cookies upstairs as cover. The tunnel collapses. The cookies do not. Within a year the couple are millionaires, franchising dough across the eastern seaboard, and the film shifts from heist picture to a study of a marriage buckling under sudden money. The plot bears a family resemblance to Larceny, Inc., a fact Allen has never bothered to confirm or deny, and the whole enterprise carries the loose, shrugging rhythm of a man who has made this kind of picture before and will make it again.", "thematic_tags": []}