Why do I keep allowing Woody Allen to do this to me? Time after time I allow myself to get suckered by good reviews and loose talk of a return to form. It’s like I never learnt anything from Match Point. Woody isn’t a complete spent force (I enjoyed some of Melinda and Melinda and Whatever Works raised a few simple chuckles), but you can’t compare any of his recent work to the likes of Manhattan and Crimes and Misdemeanors. And the fact that Midnight in Paris got nominated for Best Picture is pure insanity. Apparently some directors just have to take a crap on the screen to get nominated while others can produce the best work of their life and get silently shafted.

You could argue that the beginning of Midnight in Paris, with a couple of minutes of shots of the spectacular French capital, is a companion piece to the beginning of Manhattan. It’s almost something of a love note. But while Manhattan had a breathless beginning, full of wit and poetry and spectacular photography, this is just a tourist’s view of the city. There’s no real insight. It’s merely an uninspired visual roll call of Paris’ most famous spots.

This tourist’s eye view of a major European city is something that plagued Match Point. You never really felt that Woody knew London. It felt completely at odds with his insider view of New York. And this feeling stretches to Paris. I don’t doubt that he’s visited the city a great many times, but the whole film is a bland kind of touristy wish-fulfillment. Beneath the central conceit of the movie (Owen Wilson, after midnight, can go back in time), there isn’t a thought deeper than, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to go back in time and hang out with Ernest Hemingway and F.Scott Fitzgerald for a while...’

Call me crazy, but I expect something with a bit more substance than that when it comes to Best Picture nominees. And most criminal of all, for an Allen comedy, it’s not even that funny. Owen Wilson just lumbers around, doing a sub-par Woody Allen impression.

The only time that the film came close to making me laugh was during the scenes with Michael Sheen. Drunk with his own bullshit, Sheen plays a pretentious, pseudo-intellectual twit who undermines Gil (Wilson) at every turn. He’s so casually rude and tactless that he’s borderline sociopathic. Yet for some reason Gil’s fiance adores this nincompoop.

You know that Gil’s fiance is worthless because everything she wears has some sort of denim. Here she is in Paris, one of the most beautiful, chic cities in the world and she’s wearing a denim dress. How pathetically American of her. Oh, and she has neo-conservative parents.

I can see why Allen makes everyone so risible. He wants us to fall in line and stick rigidly behind Gil. But the characters are so overwhelmingly cartoonish that I couldn’t believe in them.

Firstly, I can’t believe that such conservative parents would want to spend any time in Paris, even if it was just for some business. Surely, given all the ridiculous hatred towards the French (hand me some Freedom Fries!), this should be the last place they would want to be. Secondly, what is Gil doing with such a wretched woman? His fiance talks down to him, she dismisses him at every turn and she’s clearly having an affair with Michael Sheen. The fact that Gil would stay with this woman, and consider marrying her, reflects very poorly on him. He’s an idiot for associating with these people.

But of course, the fact that his present day life is so dismal is meant to make the trip back in time all that much sweeter. It’s part of the whole ‘golden age thinking’ theory that’s presented. Almost everyone is disappointed with the present. Most people think that everything was better at a certain point in the past. It’s the one interesting thought that the film has.

Being even more of a slave to golden age thinking than most, Gil is delighted to be whisked away to a Paris where Hemingway, F.Scott Fitzgerald and Picasso are roaming the streets. But the character is such a fanboy, and has so little to say, that all of his encounters are nothing more than a painfully shallow fawning. There’s so little meat in this film, it’s incredible. It’s like Allen never managed to get beyond the concept.

One of the few things that I could connect to was Gil’s love of city life. He argues that no writer or painter or musician is ever going to create something that’s going to compete with a great city - each corner and each street is its own special art form. And I kind of agree. No film, no book and no piece of music can compete with my beloved London. They just can’t get close.

Eventually Gil recognises the flaw in his thinking and decides to return to the present forever. But this is only because Adriana (Marion Cotillard), the object of his affection, finds a portal to yet another part of Paris’s past. She wants to live in the Belle Epoque. Aghast that she wants to live in a time without penicillin, they go their separate ways.

With this disappointment, Gil finally realises the futility of nostalgia. Yes the present might be painful and unsatisfactory, but such is life. No matter where we are, most of us are destined to want more. It’s human nature. But any depth or melancholy is eschewed for a standard Hollywood ending. Gil breaks up with his horrible fiance and then bumps into a girl he met earlier - a girl who sells antiques at a local market. Of course, the girl is incredibly young and very attractive and they both remark upon how they love Paris in the rain. They then walk off, presumably to enjoy Paris as a couple. The triteness and neatness of this is the final nail in the coffin of a horribly mediocre film. I might go and watch Deconstructing Harry to get rid of the stench.

Here’s a question for you. How does a man get transported to an alien planet where he’s hunted for sport and still manage to put on weight? It seems to me that being a human fox in a place that has a total absence of Popeyes and Wendy’s would be a recipe for weight loss, not weight gain. But then I guess I hadn’t figured on the gluttony of Laurence Fishburne. Apparently nothing will get in the way of him and his stomach.

Fishburne plays an Air Cavalry veteran who was kidnapped by the Predators and now hides in an abandoned spacecraft. He’s been stuck there for years and has lost his mind. Well, as you would if you were being hunted daily by giant aliens with dreadlocks and you faced the dire future of never visiting Tops Diner again for their wonderful Top of the World Burger. But Fishburne’s madness isn’t exactly subtle. He has crazy eyes and talks to himself. Presumably he spends all day trying to order a Double Down with no success.

Considering the fame of the actor and his prominence in the marketing campaign, I thought that Fishburne was going to be a main character, but no sooner does he turn up than he gets killed. However, there is an amusing scene where he tries to kill the humans that he’s harbouring in his spacecraft. He says to himself that he can’t feed all these mouths (yes, there is nothing a fat bloater fears more than the prospect of precious food entering a skinny fuck’s undeserving gut) and then tries to smoke them to death. Yeah, you heard me right. He tries to smoke them to death. No burning. No bashing. No blasting. I guess he’s trying to cook them. After all, if you’re in space with no Baconaise or Donut Burgers, what better treat than some human flesh? It must make a welcome change after eating nothing but bits of spacecraft and your own poo.

On the other hand, there are Predator Dogs that he could eat. But these creatures don’t look especially tasty. They’re full of giant tusks that would gouge your eyes out and rip your nose off if you decided to be overly zealous and ate one without having a hacksaw handy. Hell, now that I think about it, how the fuck do the Predator Dogs eat their prey? How are you supposed to get something’s flesh in your mouth when you have a giant tusk blocking your gob? Complete design nonsense.

Not that the action scene featuring the Predator Dogs is anything to write home about. A bunch of these poorly rendered beasts chase the antagonists (a motley assortment of the world’s best killers) and then get killed by machine gun fire. But what makes the scene laughable is in the way that the dogs get killed. There’s a bit where a Russian with a mini-gun shoots at one of the animals for like five seconds and doesn’t even hit a dog running straight at him. These guys are worse shots than the A-Team.

To be honest, none of the action is particularly spectacular. It ranges from ho-hum gun battles to ponderous Predator fisticuffs to silly sword fights. Yep, there’s one scene where a Yakuza fights a Predator with a katana. It’s as ridiculous as it sounds and it even takes place in a field of barley. Or should that be, Predator barley? Regardless, the scene is preposterous and not at all exciting. And it also seems to me that the Predators have become significantly easier to kill, as the Yakuza guy manages to slay his bigger, stronger foe in one-on-one combat. Fair enough, the Yakuza guy also dies, but the Predators no longer seem to be so fearsome.

Hell, even Adrien Brody manages to decapitate one of the dreadlocked aliens. Although having said this, Brody is no longer the skinny bastard he once was. He has now become uber diesel. It’s quite a sight to behold once we see him without his shirt on. He stands there caked in mud, doing his best Arnie impression, and then proceeds to beat the living shit out of a Predator before eventually decapitating it. It actually ends up being quite awesome, especially as this is an Oscar winning character actor. What next, Paul Giamatti in the next Alien film, slaying xenomorphs with a GShG-7.62 machine gun?

But I don’t know why the film is so coy to show us Brody’s muscles. He obviously worked pretty hard to get them. So why deny us the modern equivalent of the awesome, muscle-bulging Dillon/Dutch handshake? Or the totally over the top but necessary gratuitous jungle-trap-building-scene where the cast ripped their shirts off so that we could have close-ups of bulging muscles as they sweated under the sun? That shit was dope! – as my friend King D would say.

But no, this is a modern film and avoids homoeroticism like the plague (bastards!). So we have a film that is pretty much played straight down the middle. There are no glorious puns, no over the top violence and not a hint of gayness. As such the film is pretty charmless. True, I wasn’t trying to gouge my eyes out like I did when I tried to watch the Aliens vs. Predator films, but it’s nowhere near as fun as the original movie. And it’s probably not even as fun as the second one. Fuck, that film had Gary Busey in it! What does this film have? Topher Grace? And Topher Grace as a serial killer. The less said about that, the better...

Once again we have a Wes Anderson film about strained family relationships full of quirky characters, but here the formula feels tired. Anderson’s characters have never really existed in the real world, but they’ve always been funny and likeable enough for you to care. Here, though, in general, I didn’t give a toss about them.

The character that comes out worst in the film is Jack, played by Jason Schwartzman. He’s a midget lothario who, despite the fact that he has no personality and is about three foot tall, dips his wick into an absurd amount of snatch. Quite what the women see in the wee man, I don’t know.

Maybe it’s because he allows even short-arses like Natalie Portman to feel big. In real life she’s, like, four foot two? But here, against this vertically challenged hipster, she looks like a giant. It’s obvious that she wants some midget that she can dominate.

In the opening short film Hotel Chevalier, we see the supposed ‘complicated’ relationship that these two people share. Portman has one or two bruises, which of course means that she’s tortured, and Jack says he doesn’t care when Portman says she’d never hurt him on purpose. This means that he’s dead inside – worn down by the crippling weight of the world.

This means that life must be really bad for Jack. But no, he lives in an upscale hotel room in Paris and seems to be a successful writer. Fair enough, money and success doesn’t guarantee happiness, but the film is overwhelmingly glib. All we get from these people are annoying one liners. ‘We fuck, I’m going to feel like shit tomorrow.’ ‘That’s okay with me.’ This pithy dialogue doesn’t generate any sympathy or understanding. It just reminds us that we’re watching a pair of annoying hipsters playing silly games with each other because they’re incapable of communicating properly. Getting to the point or talking like real human beings would be so fucking lame. Much better to let your ipod and the annoyingly twee songs contained within to make the point instead.

The opening short film is also frustrating because as well as failing to feed one’s brain, it also fails to feed one’s basic instincts. There’s a bit where we see Natalie Portman’s bum. Okay, even though she’s a horrible actress and basically she’s a head on a stick, I’m always up for seeing some celebrity toosh. But then later, there’s a bit where she’s naked. Great, some celebrity tits, too! Er, no. Once again we have an annoying tease of a film that is tit shy. Apparently the film is ‘artistic’ enough to have people say outrageous words like ‘fuck’ and it’s daring enough to show arse, but tits are beyond the pale. Grrr. Just show us your breasts, Portman. Stop fucking teasing us.

But Jack’s inexplicable success with the opposite sex extends to the feature film also. No sooner is he aboard the train than he’s declaring his intention to bone an attractive Indian girl who serves drinks. With blank eyes devoid of conviction, he says that he wants her. You laugh at his pathetic optimism, but then a few scenes later he nails the woman. The scene is jarring in the ease with which Jack scores and it adds very little to the film. Oh, he’s using sex as a way to ease his crippling pain. Okay, but at least make him work a little for it. He only has to mumble a couple of words and show her his absurd facial shrubbery before he’s balls deep in her.

The other brothers are almost equally annoying. Peter (Adrien Brody), for no real discernible reason, other than the fact that he likes using pills, decides it would be a great idea to bring a poisonous snake onboard. Maybe if he were a smackhead in the Russell Brand mould, I could understand such behaviour, but Peter isn’t a junkie. He’s just a sad sack who likes to pop pills every now and again.

As expected, the whole snake bit doesn’t really go anywhere, and the payoff – when they rush out of their room and get thrown off the train – is hardly worth the effort. The snake is just there to get the brothers off the train.

The film only really succeeds when it becomes knuckleheaded. There’s an amusing bit where two of the brothers begin fighting and then Jack tells them that even though he loves them, he’s going to mace them in the face. I also like some of the childishness. Owen Wilson’s character has a helper called Brendan who is helping draw up daily itineraries. Despite this, Wilson treats the guy like dirt…which is consistently amusing. And it’s also funny, at the end, when Wilson muses that Brendan might perhaps be his friend. When the film isn’t straining to make a point or indulging in pointless quirkiness, it’s enjoyable.

But unfortunately there’s too much straining for this to be anything other than a rather painful experience. For instance, there’s a sequence when the brothers come across some locals trying to cross a river. Unfortunately an accident occurs, and even though the brothers try and help, a child drowns. The change in tone is a little jarring (although this isn’t necessarily a bad thing), but the attempts to build some meaning out of it are pitiful. What basically happens is that a child drowns, the brothers feel a little bad and then get to go to the funeral while walking ever so coolly and mournfully in slow-motion as they’re accompanied by a piece of music that Wes Anderson probably heard while shuffling through his itunes the night before filming. It’s cheap, shallow, pointless filmmaking.

The juxtaposition of the funeral with the events leading up to the funeral of the brothers’ father also feels a little wrong. When the brothers’ father died, they went their own separate ways and fell apart. But when this Indian child dies, they’re brought together. Yes, that’s what is required in order to heal wounds – we need faceless locals to bite the bullet for us to show that life is really worth living. I mean, your dad dying is just an excuse to indulge in some adolescent grief. You can pout a little, take some pills and write some bad stories. But unless you wise up, you might die like a wog – crashing against the rocks of a river without an Urban Outfitters in sight. That would be awful, wouldn’t it?

The symbolism at the end of the film is easy to interpret. We see the three brothers running towards the train and discarding their luggage so that they can get on board. You see, they’re getting rid of their old baggage. They’re making a fresh start. They’re letting go of the past. It only needed a faceless brown child to die to make everything okay.