The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001)

The Curse of the Jade Scorpion arrives in 1940 Manhattan, where Woody Allen plays an insurance investigator of intuitive methods and Helen Hunt plays the efficiency expert hired to modernize his office. They despise each other, are hypnotized by a stage magician, and are maneuvered into jewel thefts and eventual romance. It is a screwball comedy assembled with visible care and almost no comic yield. The film wants to be charming. It settles for beige.

This is a period caper set in a uniformly white Manhattan, and the film has no interest in disturbing that arrangement. The office is staffed with the usual Allen repertory of nervous white men and sharp-tongued white women, and the Chinatown sequence exists only as a location for the third act. No racial themes are engaged, no ethnic texture is examined. The one recurring piece of social observation is that Chris, the boss, intends to make Betty Ann retire once they marry. The film notes this, wrinkles its brow for perhaps four seconds, and returns to the hypnosis business.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. There is no LGBTQ presence, no environmental content, no critique of the insurance trade as an institution, no body politics, no neurodivergence. Hypnosis here is a plot device and a joke about consent, not a metaphor. The 1940s are rendered as nostalgic wallpaper, all brass and rain-slicked streets, with history treated as set dressing. The picture's moral instruction is limited to a few muttered observations about luck and honesty, delivered between gags. Allen reportedly considers this his worst film, a harsh verdict from a man with a long filmography, though not an unreasonable one. It is a minor, harmless, softly lit thing. It lectures nobody. It merely fails to amuse.