The tough job of hanging onto a modicum of respect for late-career Woody Allen is about to get even tougher: the director's latest film "Irrational Man," even by his patchy recent standards, is an embarrassment. And not of the "of riches" kind. Perhaps there is something interesting in the idea of replaying the thrillerish, moral-quandary qualities of "Match Point" for light comedy (signalled more by a wearisomely repetitive use of jazzy cuts from the Ramsay Lewis Trio rather than by any, you know, jokes) but while that appears to be the formal aim, the result neither thrills nor amuses and so generically ends up in the tragically overpopulated category marked "Woody Allen dramedy misfire" instead. Because depressingly, this is a Woody Allen film and no mistake: the tepid murder plot, the college professor/student relationship, the constant references to Kant and Heidegger and Dostoevsky, the central character struggling to find meaning while...
