Sally (Naomi Watts, left) and Roy (Josh Brolin) are having marital troubles in Woody Allen's newest film, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. (Keith Hamshere/Mongrel Media)

You have to hand it to Woody Allen: he keeps on showing up. Every autumn, like clockwork, the director releases a new movie, and though he’s been mining the same themes for over 40 years, he can still create a smart, wry treat like Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008).

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is nowhere near as good as Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but it goes down fairly easily, which might be all Allen fans can hope for.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is nowhere near as good as that film, but it goes down fairly easily, which might be all Allen fans (and I count myself among them) can hope for in a godless universe where many of his late-period efforts have been as stale as Scoop (2006) and dyspeptic as Whatever Works (2009).

His latest begins on an energetic note, with a narrator swiftly introducing Helena (Gemma Jones, floating on air), a flibbertygibbet who’s making a frantic beeline for her psychic’s apartment. Gulping down scotch while the London version of Mistress Cleo predicts nothing but rosy light and good times in store, Helena’s a goofy, instantly likeable flake – Annie Hall reimagined as an optimistic 70-year-old simpleton.

From there, the movie spirals out to the rest of Allen’s decidedly unmerry band of players. There is Alfie (Anthony Hopkins), the mortality-fearing gent who trades in a 40-year marriage to Helena for fake tans, a sports car and a much-younger hooker girlfriend named Charmaine (scene-stealer Lucy Punch). Watching on in horror is Helena’s daughter, Sally (Naomi Watts), an art gallery assistant who divides her time between humouring Mom and supporting her husband Roy (Josh Brolin), a writer trying (and failing) to live up to the success of his first novel.

This promising setup allows the director to touch on the themes that continue to obsess him. Faced with an existence that’s cruel, lonely and often miserable, this bunch opts for denial, be it in the form of a younger, gold-digging woman or bogus predictions about handsome strangers. All kinds of comic bad behaviour ensues: Roy falls into a dalliance with Dia (Freida Pinto), the comely neighbour he spies on from his bedroom window, while the put-upon Sally develops her own slow-burning crush on her married boss, Greg (Antonio Banderas).

If a lot of this sounds familiar, it is. Allen has cribbed entire plot points from his last true triumph, Husbands and Wives (1992). But where that film had rich, multidimensional characters you could root for (even at their most horrible), there’s something phoned-in about You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger’s screenplay, funny as it often is. The voiceover (which includes lines like, “OK, now let’s go back and take a look at Alfie”) is the equivalent of ellipsis dots on Allen’s computer screen, as if the auteur is skimming over the parts that he was too bored to fill in.

The sloppiness shows in the secondary characters, including Iris (Anna Friel), a self-destructive artist who inexplicably disappears from the film after a few brief scenes. Pinto’s character is an underwritten fantasy figure from the start. Described as “the beautiful creature in red,” she flounders, because she’s got nothing real to play. Are we really supposed to believe she is flattered by Roy’s confession that he watches her undress, or buy that she’s working on a PhD in musicology simply because she’s shown strumming a guitar?

By the film’s midway point, it begins to feel like Allen is communicating with his fans via shorthand, rather than developing complete scenes. All of the tropes he’s used over his lengthy career are on display, starting with the kooky lady who seeks solace in hocus-pocus. And when a spontaneous rainstorm erupts on the London streets, you’ll know two characters are going to fall in love, just as you’ll predict a marriage is in its death throes as soon as the wife shrieks, Mia Farrow-style, “I’ve got a headache! My head is splitting!”

Jonathan (Roger Ashton-Griffiths, left) and Helena (Gemma Jones) begin an unlikely courtship in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. (Keith Hamshere/Mongrel Media)

In spite of Allen’s often lazy approach, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is entertaining, largely thanks to the game actors, all clearly relishing the chance to play such flawed, neurotic characters. Of the women, the mischievous Lucy Punch fares best, in her genuinely side-splitting scenes as the bedazzled, pleather-sporting Charmaine. She always manages to keep the movie light and bouncy, even while it’s dealing with existential despair.

But You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is ultimately a male story, and the film’s biggest surprises come courtesy of Hopkins and Josh Brolin. The scenarios they play out aren’t particularly new, but Hopkins is the first old dog in an Allen movie to down Viagra, and he always makes the audience aware of the pathetic desperation underlying his attempts to cling to his youth.

Brolin goes him one better as Roy, a person filled with creative longing, who’s grappling with the sudden realization he has no real abilities. The actor shambles down the street with a paunch hanging out over his belt, and everything about Roy’s doughy demeanour suggests someone who has always taken shortcuts, rather than put in the hours. Deep down, he knows he’d rather have lunch with Dia than write, and Brolin gets at all the self-loathing that entails.

As this morality play draws to its perversely amusing close, all is probably not as it should be, though Roy and the other unlikeable characters do get what they deserve. Helena is the one character in the film with the sense to appreciate little bits of happiness when she finds them – a valuable lesson for viewers of this uneven film.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger opens Oct. 1.

Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBC News.