The very best thing that ever happened to Magic in the Moonlight is that writer-director Woody Allen made The Curse of the Jade Scorpion prior to it. The two films resemble each other in multiple ways: they're both set just outside the Great Depression (Jade Scorpion in New York in 1940, Magic in 1928 in France), both have plots based on the voguish paranormal interests of their setting (hypnotism, spirit mediums), both touch on rather awkward Orientalism also befitting their setting without necessarily embracing it. But Jade Scorpion is down around the absolute bottom of Allen's cinematic efforts, confused in its plotting, angrily old-fashioned, and hobbled by what might well be the worst performance of Allen's entire career (he took on the part only when he ran out of time to find a better-suited candidate). Magic in the Moonlight, in contrast, is merely not good, and that makes it seem a great deal better than it actually is, according to the rules of the ever-more-complicated game by which Allen's wildly inconsistent career is ranked and sorted.

The other very best thing that happened to Magic in the Moonlight is that Colin Firth plays the lead character in just about the most rewarding way that I suppose is possible. Like most Allen protagonists, Stanley Crawford is a vessel for the author's opinions and nervous energy; unlike most Allen protagonists, he's being played by an actor who has the good sense not to play the character as a Woody Allen impression. Firth's portrayal makes Stanley a supercilious, spiny, entitled, heavily British figure, without a hint of the Allen-esque neurotic, and the actor's refusal to soften the character or demand our affection beyond the fact that he's Colin Firth, and thus the handsomest and most charismatic motherfucker in the room, is almost solely responsible for saving the film from its worst impulses.

Stanley has two main drives in life: he performs stage magic under a heavy layer of yellowface as Wei Ling Soo, the toast of Europe, and he moonlights, like great illusionists before and since, as a professional skeptic debunking claims by psychics, mediums, and other paranormal claimants. He's approached after a show in Berlin by his colleague Howard Burkan (Simon McBurney), who has already failed to debunk the claims of an American named Sophie Baker (Emma Stone), currently fleecing an enthusiastic family of her countrymen residing in the Côte d'Azur, very near to Stanley's beloved aunt Vanessa (Eileen Atkins). Excited at the chance to prove his one-of-a-kind skills at being a priggish skeptic, Stanley takes up the offer, putting of his vacation with his very sensible, logical fiancé Olivia (Catherine McCormack) to meet the enthusiastic believer Grace Catledge (Jacki Weaver), hoping to pour money at Sophie and her grim-faced mother (Marcia Gay Harden), her lovestruck son Brice (Hamish Linklater), and her concerned, skeptical daughter Caroline (Erica Leerhsen) and son-in-law George (Jeremy Shamos). He's a superior jerk, not remotely disguising his contempt for Sophie or any of the people who believe her, but the young woman is oddly unruffled about the whole thing, calmly and patiently proving herself to him over and over again, and ultimately winning him over to her side. Suddenly convinced of the existence of an unseen world and an afterlife for the first time in his bleak, nihilistic life, Stanley goes all gaga on the possibilities of living, not stopping to notice that Sophie has begun going gaga for him. And this being a Woody Allen picture, it's obviously only an exercise in waiting for the other shoe to drop, and for Stanley to figure out just how Sophie has, in fact, been swindling him with her fake psychic gifts.

The thing where Allen's male heroes and female love interests are always separated by a full generation is conventional wisdom enough that it's almost lazy to bring it up, but even so, Firth and Stone are a brutally mismatched pair of lovers. Which honestly has less to do with their ages, than with the simple reality of film star chemistry (they have none), plus the way that script, particularly in its final act, so clearly establishes characters who would have absolutely no real reason for tolerating each other. And Firth's tendency to sharpen his role's edges rather than blunt them. It's death to any romcom when you don't merely fail to believe that the central pair would end up together, but are driven to root against them.

In fairness, Magic in the Moonlight is not, primarily, a romcom; it's a prickly little sitcom about a jackass saying arrogant things to people who deserve them. Which also doesn't really work very well, though thank God for Firth, doing all he can to make the character seem funny and erudite instead of just sour. Everything else in the movie is flat and tone-deaf; even Stone, a terrific comic player who has done more with weaker scripts than this more than once, but ends up straitjacketed by the story's incomprehensible designs for Sophie's motivations over the course of the film.

At points, it does seem like a good movie could have been crafted out of this at a very early stage: say, before it gained its concept. The earliest scenes, in Berlin, are actually quite good at capturing a sense of the very particular place and time being depicted (obviously none of us want to see Allen direct a new film of Cabaret, but I'm suddenly kind of curious). Throughout the whole thing, Sonia Grande's slightly artificial, bright costumes give the movie a playful period feeling that suggests the movies of the late '20s more than the actuality of the late '20s, but in so doing, stress the fizzy genre elements of the film, and give it a little bit of lighthearted energy that it badly, badly needs. And Darius Khondji, working with Allen for the fourth time, makes the southern French landscapes looking terrifically gorgeous without just relying on blunt travelogue photography.

So it looks decent, at least, which isn't the most common thing for an Allen picture. It's also bogged down by clumsy, obvious jokes, which is increasingly more and more common, sad to say. There's no charm and a lot of broad insipidity here, and even by the current trend of every other Allen film feeling rushed, flimsy, and obvious, it's a rocky thing. It's not funny enough to cover up its lack of fresh ideas; or maybe better to say that it's not insightful enough to make up for how flat the jokes are. Anyway, it's not even good enough to be half-insulted with the phrase "minor Allen": it's a misfire with good costumes and a deeply pleasant Colin Firth, and the laziest writing in the filmmaker's canon since at least Whatever Works. History tells us that Allen will rebound from this quickly; let's desperately hope so, because this is about as generic and uninteresting as his films get.