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Woody Allen's 'Dream' feels thin, perfunctory

Late-career Woody Allen has fallen into a bad habit.

He's stopped doing the important work of finding the details and nuances that allow actors to disappear into a role (maybe because Woody Allen never has to be anyone other than Woody Allen in a Woody Allen movie).

"Cassandra's Dream" is a case in point. Allen casts Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell as London brothers whose flaws and ambitions lead them down a bloody path.

You wait for the point where, say, McGregor will find his footing as a small-timer whose big dreams lead to terrible compromises, but all he gets from Allen is crummy dialogue - at least George Lucas gave Ewan a light saber.

I thought a big weakness of Allen's "Match Point" was the generic way it showed its central character - an amoral social-climber - rising rapidly in the world of "business." What business? He worked in an office, had meetings, and a computer whose flat panel flickered with charts and graphs, but his actual trade was never more than a few props.

Same thing here. McGregor's character wants to leave his father's restaurant and get into "hotels." As what . . . a busboy, a manager, investor? His partners seek an investment of 80,000 pounds, which wouldn't buy a hotel on Baltic Avenue in a decent game of Monopoly.

We're told Farrell's character has a gambling problem, but aside from a few establishing shots of a dog track and a poker table, there is nothing seductively vivid enough to draw us into his addiction.

Part of what makes "There Will Be Blood" initially fascinating, for example, is its painstaking reconstruction of how an oil company might have been built at the turn of the century - down to the scaffolds that haul the bubbling pitch from the ground.

Allen, though, doesn't do any of the grunt work. He races past his own premise to situations that interest him. In "Cassandra's Dream," the increasingly desperate brothers get involved with a rich uncle (Tom Wilkinson) who has the money they need, and a dark side that places some bloody strings around the cash.

It's familiar territory for Allen, going back to "Crimes and Misdemeanors" - cold portraits of people who discover they can kill, steal and seduce without remorse. His wrinkle here is to give one brother a conscience.

This movie, however, feels thin and perfunctory. By the time the blokes played by McGregor and Farrell get around to confronting their misdeeds, they're the only ones who care. *

Produced by Letty Aronson, Stephen Tenenbaum and Gareth Wiley, written and directed by Woody Allen, music by Philip Glass, distributed by the Weinstein Co.