Don't Drink the Water (1994, USA, Woody Allen) *1/2
More like Don't Watch This Movie. This is the most obscure of all Woody Allen's films as director and with reason- it's debatable as to whether it counts as a film. It's a made-for-TV movie that Allen directed for HBO. Do movies made for television count as, um, movies? Well, I already considered Pioneers in Ingalstadt and Angels in America to be a films, so I suppose that should count this. The larger philosophic arguments about movies made for television will wait for another time.
Don't Drink the Water is based on the play of the same name Allen wrote in 1966, but the film was made in the same year as Bullets Over Broadway, so its features the "earlier, funnier" Allen content with the more "mature" Allen style. So the movie is pure farce, the lightest material that Allen has done since Sleeper. The films sole ambition is to be funny, and it completely fails. According to the semi-reliable Wikipedia, Allen made the movie because a previous adaptation in 1969 was so bad that he wanted to see the material done right. Frankly, it would be hard for the other version to be much worse than this.
Set in the American embassy of an unnamed Eastern European country during the Kennedy Administration, the film stars Michael J. Fox as Axel, the incompetent son of the ambassador (Josef Sommer). Against his better judgment, the ambassador leaves Axel in charge for two weeks while he returns to the US to pursue a cabinet position. While he is gone, a visiting American family (Allen with Julie Kavner as his wife and Kalamazoo?'s Mayim Bialik as the teenage daughter) is falsely accused of being spies, so they are trapped in the embassy until a diplomatic solution can be reached. At the same time, an Arab Emir (John Doumanian) visit's the embassy with his seventeen wives. Comic hijacks emerge as the uncultured Allen annoys everyone.
The film is so slight in its content that it's hard to find any criticism other than the fact that the jokes are lame. But aside from an occasional zinger, most of them sputter and die. Allen also includes the same joke over and over again, such as a magiciain whose tricks always fail. Wocka wocka.
You are only going to want to see this if you absolutely need to see everyone Woody Allen film. I like Allen enough to want to do that, but this movie is like being around someone who keeps telling the same joke over and over again, in the hopes it will eventually be funny. Kind of like me on a lesser evening. Remember, the film was made in '94, that's one year later than '93, but one year earlier than '95? Get it? Do you need to hear it again?
Don't Drink the Water (1994)