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Small Time Crooks


Small Time Crooks (2000)

This is the seventeenth Woody Allen film I watched. It is an enjoyable film with a very nice script, as usual, but it's not one of his 'greats'.

It tells the original story about a failed crook, Ray, (Woody Allen) and his wife, Frenchy. Ray has a couple of friends and together they want to rob a bank by renting a former pizza place so they can dig a tunnel from there to the bank's strongroom. They let Frenchy open a cookie store as a cover business, but soon her store begins to have a lot of succes. When the gang gets caught, while they wrongly surfaced from their tunnel into a clothing store, they assure the agent that they will only focus on the cookie store and that he can have a share in the profit. They start a cookie franchise and one year later all people involved are filthy rich!
Wealth doesn't seem to please Ray much, though, because his wife wants to become a real socialite and 'hires' an art salesman, David, (Hugh Grant) as her teacher for 'high culture'. David is actually very happy that he can spend time with Frenchy, because he sees in her a way to get very rich...

This story is told in a very comical manner with a mix of slapstick moments and some more dialogue based scenes. I actually really enjoyed it, although it didn't have the depth or greatness of some of Allen's other work. I rate this movie: