Gire: Woody's philosophical crime comedy Kant cut it

Few things make me want to play Russian roulette (with six bullets in the cylinder) more than inner-monologing voice-overs that constantly update what movie characters think, feel and desire.

In his 45th feature, "Irrational Man," Woody Allen not only lets monologues handle the heavy dramatic lifting, he employs one of the silliest pieces of misdirection ever conceived, a narrative cheat that can't be revealed without spoiling a major plot point.

With an obvious tip of the cap to Alfred Hitchcock (particularly "Shadow of a Doubt") and his own earlier works "Crimes and Misdemeanors" plus "Match Point," Allen tells the story of a depressed, messed-up philosophy professor Abe Lucas (ideally cast with an irritable, slouchy Joaquin Phoenix) fixated on pulling off the perfect murder.

Before Abe hits the campus of the fictional Braylin College in Rhode Island, his reputation as a tragic, alcoholic womanizer already has students and faculty abuzz with rumors. Did his close friend really get blown up in the Middle East? Did his wife really dump him for his best bud?

Abe awkwardly settles in, and a strange romantic triangle forms between him, attention-starved professor Rita Richards (a sadly comic Parker Posey) and Abe's star student Jill Pollard (the effervescent Emma Stone).

Jill has a hot relationship with a fellow student; Rita is married. Yet, both succumb to Abe's appealing emotional arrest, the result of a former political activist rendered impotent by disillusionment.

One day in a diner, Abe and Jill overhear a woman lamenting how a crooked judge unfairly favors her ex-husband in a bitter custody case.

Abe wonders if the world wouldn't be better off if somebody killed this horrible judge. What if he could pull off the perfect murder?

"This is the meaningful act I've been searching for!" he blurts to Jill.

Abe becomes a man with a purpose, finding inspiration that fires him up and recharges his teaching and sex life.

With Phoenix applying full-court sympathy to Abe, "Irrational Man" (the title stems from philosopher William Christopher Barrett's "Irrational Man," considered one of the most approachable examinations of existentialism) almost convinces us to adapt Abe's sociopathic world view.

If Allen recycles familiar themes - the meaning of life in a randomly amoral universe, the tacit acceptance of all sexual encounters - he also loads his screenplay with clever shout-outs to philosophers Kant, Sartre, Heidegger and others, letting them pose some of life's stickier questions, such as "Why repeat Ramsey Lewis' instrumental version of Billy Page's song 'The In Crowd' so often that it makes the eardrums bleed?"