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.

Based upon a not-so-great novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife manages to improve upon the source material, but only slightly. This isn’t a Jaws or a Godfather – mediocre novels that were stripped bare and resurrected as cinematic masterpieces by visionary filmmakers. Instead we have an extremely minor improvement – we’re talking fractions.

Audrey Niffenegger’s novel was a case of someone’s ambition exceeding their talent. The premise behind the story was excellent but the execution left a lot to be desired. At times the characters were bad tempered and thoroughly unlikable and there was also a lot of queasy sexual content. Thankfully most of that has been erased from the film. But not all of it.

The most dubious part of the film is the first time that Henry (Eric Bana) and Clare (Rachel McAdams) make love. Henry has only known this woman for a couple of hours but the woman already knows him quite well. She knows him because an older version of him travelled back in time and befriended her when she was a child. So they make love and then we cut to their first meeting. Somehow the juxtaposition of mind-blowing sex and a child’s picnic seems slightly wrong. Yes, the filmmakers try and make everything seem as sweet and innocent as possible, but we’ve just watched these two characters screw. And so no matter how cute the filming is, it’s going to seem wrong to watch a child be confronted with a naked man in a bush with the knowledge that they’re going to be lovers.

And wouldn’t this be weird for Henry? Remember, he already knows that he’s going to sleep with an adult version of this girl. This is his future wife. Wouldn’t it be a bit strange to be confronted with a child version of his lover? Apparently not. He doesn’t display any awkwardness at all. I know that if I was confronted with a child version of my wife I’d be extremely self-conscious…and not just because she couldn’t speak English when she was six years-old.

But back to the first sex scene. Another reason why it doesn’t work is because Henry has only known this girl for a few hours. Sure she tells him a bunch of stuff and talks to him about his time travelling, but he seems far too willing to jump in the sack with her. Unlike Clare, his feelings seem to be motivated by lust rather than by love – she has years of emotional investment in him; he only has a couple of hours.

I also don’t like how the two main characters seemingly don’t have any free will. All of their decisions are already made for them by all the crazy time travelling that Henry does – he’s destined to fall in love with Clare and she’s destined to marry him and they’re destined to have a child and they’re destined to call it Alba. With everything pre-arranged, you kind of wonder what’s the point?

Clare even makes a joke about her lack of choice. When Henry asks to marry her, she says no. She says that she’s exercising her free will. But then she says yes. It’s such an awful piece of dialogue and such a clumsy piece of acting that the lack of choice for the characters becomes even more startling. These people just seem to be going through the motions.

Of course there are attempts to provide some conflict. At one point Henry misses Christmas and Clare has to open her presents on her own. But her unwillingness to talk to him once he comes back seems incredibly petty. She knows that her husband can disappear at any time and she seems to have tolerated it quite well up until this point. Consequently she comes over as a bitch.

Another reason why I didn’t like the character that much. Clare and Henry make several attempts to have a child. However, the unborn children seem to have the same problem that Henry has – they time travel (therefore, somewhere in the past or in the future, a foetus just appeared out of nowhere – how charming). Knowing what distress this is causing him and his wife, Henry decides to have a vasectomy. Aha, he’s exercising his free will. Oh, but then the angry wife decides to fuck a younger version of Henry (who has time travelled to Clare’s present) and gets impregnated in the back of a beige Volvo. She says this isn’t cheating, but I’m not sure. But even if it isn’t, it’s fairly despicable. Okay, your husband should have told you that he was getting snipped, but a grudge fuck with a younger version of him is pretty bad. And then getting pregnant too and saying ‘fuck you’ to a decision he’s tried to make for your mutual benefit smacks of selfishness in the extreme.

But then Clare’s behaviour often smacks of selfishness. After a couple of miscarriages, she ridicules the idea of adopting a child. She wants to have Henry’s child and nothing else will do. Okay, but isn’t she dooming her offspring with the same dismal fate as her husband? As my wife pointed out, what’s she’s doing is no better than when people decide to have a child even though they’re aware that there’s a good chance they’re going to give them some crippling genetic disorder. She’s an idiot.

However, the couple, thanks to a young Henry, eventually manage to have a child. The moppet in question is exceedingly cute and time travels as well. Well done, Clare. Well done.

The end of the film is a shameless attempt to pull on your heartstrings, but because the story is so overwhelmingly manipulative, it didn’t work for me. You see, Henry time travels and then loses the use of his legs. He then has to go about in a wheelchair, fearful of his next time travelling venture, as he probably won’t survive it. Eventually he’s transported to the meadow where he met his wife when she was a child. Now, though, it’s winter and he gets shot. But he doesn’t get shot by just anyone. He gets shot by his wife’s father (he’s a Republican hunter type, kind of like Dick Cheney but more deadly with a gun). It’s a total accident but Henry is now dead meat and dies soon after. It’s kind of a ridiculous way to die.

But when you think that the film has thankfully come to an end, there’s a scene where Henry visits his daughter and bereaved wife. It’s supposed to be heart warming (the wife runs through the meadow to embrace her husband before he disappears) but in reality it seems kind of awful. Rather than move on, are these characters doomed to wait around for the odd visit from a dead Henry? If it’s supposed to leave you with a warm, tingly feeling in your guttiwuts, it fails dismally.