You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger - Not bad and not as ‘rom-com’ as you may may expect

I hate romantic comedies.  However, despite ‘You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger’ looking and sounding like a romantic comedy, there isn’t that much romance in there.  Or at least what little romance there is comes a noticeable second place to the comedy element.  Especially as most of the couples who make up the 'ensemble cast' seem to be falling OUT of love, rather than falling IN love!

I haven’t seen as many Woody Allen films as I probably should have, so I can’t really compare how this one rates against the bulk of his others.  But I can tell you that it’s about a family in London and their various relationships, all of which are due to run into some major turbulence of one type or another.  I can also mention that the script is pretty sharp.  There is a lot of narration which I’m not sure how necessary it is.  The film does tend to tell you a lot of what’s going to happen before it happens.  This could be considered ‘lazy film-making’ as it ‘tells’ rather than ‘shows.’ However, it does speed a lot of things on.  The film isn’t overly-long and it does seem to be pretty well-trimmed, keeping all the best bits in, instead of dragging the run-time out with a load of unnecessary scenes.

The ‘ensemble’ cast all play their parts well.  Of course you could say that one drawback from having a lot of great characters in a short film means that none of them are really ‘fleshed-out’ enough.  But, they all turn in one excellent performance after the next.

I’m not sure whether this is a ‘spoiler’ or just common sense, but, if you’re expecting everything to turn out ‘happy ever after’ for absolutely everyone on screen, then you may be deluding yourself.  Because there’s so many characters, it would be madness to assume that everyone will be totally happy with the way things have turned out by the time the credits roll.  From my interpretation of the ending, only one couple truly gets an 'end.' The other stories are just kind of left as they are and it's up to you to decide how they will live, i.e. happily every after or otherwise..

So, enjoy the comedy, don’t expect too much romance, as the film centres on human nature rather than constantly showing us instances where couples fall in love, only to break up straight away, simply because the plot dictates that they must.

8/10 The Force is definitely strong with this one