Director: Woody Allen
Running time: 108 minutes

***

THE annual Woody Allen picture is fast becoming cinema's equivalent to doing your taxes or having a dental check-up – with all of them inducing the same apprehensive anticipation. It certainly isn't as easy to persuade someone to come and see the new Woody film with me as it used to be either; I had to throw in dinner and first shot on the Wii in order to find a gallant escort to Cassandra's Dream.

Still, actors continue to regard his movies as the dernier cri in cerebral chic, perhaps because Scarlett Johansson and Samantha Morton got some of their best notices for Match Point and Sweet And Lowdown. On the other hand, who can place Will Ferrell in Melinda And Melinda? Most recently there was Scoop, which did nothing for Hugh Jackman or, ironically, Scarlett Johansson again.

Allen's third foray into British filmmaking stars Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell, and again it's not quite the coup it might seem for either party.

McGregor and Farrell play brothers Ian and Terry, who are working-class wide boys. How do we know this? Well they both have cockernee accents modelled on Michael Caine circa The Italian Job, and the first thing one of them says is how very working class they are. At times like these, Cassandra's Dream comes across as a Woody Allen for inattentive five-year-olds. Which brother was which again? Don't worry, just about every exchange between the siblings ends with "Terry" or "Ian". McGregor's Ian is a slick, ambitious wheeler dealer who wants to get rich quick and live in Hollywood, while as garage mechanic Terry, Farrell is especially good at being weaselly and a bit pathetic, weeping at times as if he might be forced into making Alexander 2.

The brothers currently have only dinghy budgets, but they harbour big boat dreams. At the start of the film they are buying a fixer-upper yacht, and like the seer Cassandra, we can forecast this isn't going to end well. And that's what they call their new boat: Cassandra's Dream. I'm afraid the symbolism doesn't get any more subtle either. There are casual references to fate and Aristotle not often heard around Hoxton, and when Ian becomes infatuated with Angela (Hayley Atwell), a dusky-eyed stage actress, she tells him that she's currently starring in "a very moral play" as "a character to create erotic tension". Angela turns out to have expensive tastes which Ian can't bring himself to admit he can't afford, while Terry owes the GDP of a small country to loan sharks. Hitting a financial wall, they take their begging bowl to their rich uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson), a plastic surgeon. Howard's success is a model for Ian and Terry, but they are clearly not ruthless enough to achieve his wealth and power since they have to steel themselves to meet his price for bailing them out – bumping off an innocent man (Phil Davies) who threatens Howard's crooked business.

Questions of conscience and God will not surprise anyone who liked this movie when it was called Match Point, or who saw Allen's superior meditation, Crimes And Misdemeanors, but Cassandra's Dream is just simplistic and monotonous despite Farrell's rather affecting portrait of a personality disintegrating with guilt.

Allen's British affair seems to have drawn to an end here. His next project is set in Spain with the alluring but possibly not entirely savvy Johansson back to star opposite Javier Bardem. Good luck to Spain in trying to influence Woody's Manhattanite mindset too: despite making three movies here, Allen's pictures noticeably struggle to incorporate anything resembling British character except perhaps the Gherkin, which he clearly has a huge crush on. All three of Woody's Britpics manage to find a prominent position for London's big, glass phallus. Have you thought of seeing a therapist about this, Mr Allen?

• On general release from Friday