Woody Allen's slow, sad decline continues apace with Anything Else, a joylessly plodding film that cannibalizes Allen's classics of the '70s and '80s while managing only a few decent one-liners. A romantic comedy that's neither romantic nor much of a comedy, Anything Else stars Jason Biggs in the thankless role of a younger Allen surrogate, a doomed gig only John Cusack in Bullets Over Broadway has made into anything other than an embarrassment. Awkwardly incorporating Allen's mannerisms, delivery, and neurotic persona, Biggs' performance brings to mind a toddler dressing up in Daddy's oversized clothes: Who would have thought that starring in a Woody Allen movie would prove an artistic demotion from pastry-fucking in a teen-sex comedy? Yet Biggs' anxious, flop-sweat-drenched performance as a divorced 21-year-old comedy writer makes his performance in the American Pie movies look sublime and restrained by comparison. Christina Ricci fares equally poorly as the unstable sexpot who makes Biggs miserable, while Allen himself co-stars as a crazy comedy writer, which means he's playing a slightly more eccentric variation on his usual persona. In superb comedy-dramas like Hannah And Her Sisters and Crimes And Misdemeanors, Allen juggled the absurd and the profound with grace, but when his gun-nut Anything Else character references the Holocaust to support his free-floating paranoia–which he does with regularity–it just seems in poor taste. If this were the work of anyone other than Allen, it would be widely and accurately derided as a terrible Woody Allen knockoff. Watching Anything Else, it's hard to shake the conviction that the venerable auteur has already made this movie 15 times before, always with superior results. It's like watching a once-great rock group go through motions it's repeated for so long and with so little vigor that they've lost all meaning for audience and performers alike.