Larry David pretty, pretty bad in new film

The casting of Larry David, star and creator of Curb Your Enthusiasm, as the neurosis-fuelled protagonist in Woody Allen's latest New York comedy, Whatever Works, sounded like a match made in heaven. But on the eve of the film's opening in Los Angeles and New York, the reviews suggest otherwise. As Larry himself might put it, the critics are pretty, pretty unimpressed.

David, 62, plays the cantankerous and pessimistic physicist Boris Yellnikoff, who has a May to December romance with a younger woman, Melody St. Anne Celestine, played by Evan Rachel Wood (above with Larry David).

The trouble with David's Boris, the critics say, is that he is too angry and unlikeable. "Boris is such a grouch he makes previous Allen misanthropes look positively Panglossian," writes Andy Klein in the Los Angeles Times. "The stiffness of David's performance gives one renewed appreciation for Allen's sometimes overlooked acting abilities."

'Not even Larry David can salvage Woody's Whatever Works' is the headline in the Village Voice. Critic Jim Hoberman goes on to say that "Allen's exercise in Woody Allen nostalgia... is powered almost entirely by the presence of a single, larger-than-life, and less-than-likeable, figure".

Larry David must be wondering what he got himself in to. He admitted last week that he had had to be convinced to take the role. "I don't like challenges - and this was certainly a challenge," he said. "I actually called Woody and said, 'Are you sure you want me to do this?' And he said, 'Yeah, you'll be fine.'"

One rare fan of David's performance is the Huffington Post's film reviewer Marshall Fine who calls it "a stroke of casting brilliance". Fine writes: "It's already a minority opinion, but I enjoyed Woody Allen's newest, Whatever Works. I won't go so far to classify it as A-level Woody Allen, but it's solidly in the high B range - funny, heartfelt, with hokey jokes and occasionally surprising insights."

Woody originally wrote the Boris role for Zero Mostel more than 30 years ago but the Producers star died in 1977 before the movie could be made. Allen shelved the script but dug it out last year when the threat of an actor's strike meant he needed a ready-to-shoot project.

Fine believes the script is still relevant in 2009. "The writing, buffed by Allen to bring it up to date but dealing with remarkably consistent themes 30 years later, is less reflexively jokey than Allen was in the '70s. Still, the old rhythms are hard to shed, particularly when you've got David kibitzing on everything around him."