Directed by and starring Woody Allen (“Annie Hall”, “Manhattan”), “Bananas” is a somewhat amusing comedy that is clearly supposed to be a satire on the revolution in Cuba that saw Fidel Castro come into power.

A bumbling New Yorker by the name of Fielding Mellish (Allen) gets a new activist girlfriend (Louise Lasser “Requiem For A Dream”). It isn’t long before they breakup and so Mellish travels to a tiny fictional Latin America country and finds himself joining its latest revolution. As the film goes on, it of course gets crazier and crazier and as a result, becomes less and less funny.

Woody Allen is of course the master of creating pitiful individuals that inhabit that real world in his best films such as “Annie Hall” and “Scenes From A Mall” but here, much like in “Sleeper”, he’s placed into a larger-than-life situation and it just isn’t as funny. If you watch his performances in movies such as “Sleeper” and compare them to those in his films such as “Manhattan”, you can see he tries too hard to be funny in the former. Louise Lasser isn’t particularly funny as the girlfriend. Watch out for an appearance by a young Sylvester Stallone (“Rocky”).

There are some genuinely funny scenes in this movie and there are times when it is clear that a lot of passion and energy has gone into it but I never really felt like I was enjoying it all that much. The movie is a lot like Allen’s “Take The Money And Run” in that it seems to pitch itself just a little too far outside of reality for it to work. I’m sure plenty of people will enjoy “Bananas” but it just wasn’t quite the movie for me; maybe I’m just wanting too much from a Woody Allen movie after seeing what he is capable of.