This is about as good as a late Woody Allen film gets, which is to say there are some amusing moments, you can watch it without cringing (mostly), and it's not going to make anyone forget how much better Allen's early movies were.
This one takes place in several Spanish cities, but mostly Barcelona, where Vicky and Cristina (Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson) are spending their summer with some of Cristina's relatives. They meet a local painter, the grandly egotistical Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), whose idea of a suave introduction is to invite the two women to join him for a weekend of good food, good wine, and lots of hot three-way sex. Cristina is charmed and agrees to join Juan Antonio; Vicky, who is engaged to a very nice (albeit rather bland) man, is appalled by Juan Antonio's arrogance, but tags along to try and keep Cristina from doing anything too foolish.
Before the weekend is over, of course, Vicky finds herself struggling with her own attraction to Juan Antonio. And because a romantic triangle isn't quite complicated enough, along comes Juan Antonio's ex-wife, Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz), a passionate, suicidal, somewhat deranged woman who's never really stopped loving her husband.
Bardem and Cruz are saddled with cliched roles here -- the Latin lover and the Spanish spitfire -- to which they bring as much life and dimension as anyone probably could, but the characters aren't well enough written for either of them to do much. (On a personal note, I confess that I have always been somewhat perplexed by the alleged sex appeal of Javier Bardem. Fine actor, to be sure, and immensely charismatic, but sexy? Really?)
The movie's most interesting performance comes from Rebecca Hall as Vicky, who struggles against her attraction to Juan Antonio, not only to avoid cheating on her fiance, but to keep from hurting Cristina.
It is particularly pleasant to note that this movie does not have an obvious Woody surrogate, saddled with delivering all of his/her dialogue in Allen's distinctive rhythms. It's an Allen screenplay, of course, so those rhythms aren't entirely absent (they're most noticable in the restaurant scene where Vicki and Cristina first meet Juan Antonio), but we're not clubbed over the head with a bad Woody impression as we were by, for instance, Kenneth Branagh in Celebrity.
A minor diversion, perfectly harmless, but likely to fade from memory in a matter of hours.
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