Scoop

Woody Allen makes a film a year and has done for the last few decades, but that doesn't mean he has enough material for them all.
Scoop is this year's entry and after the fantastic thriller that was last year's Match Point, hopes were high that the past master was back to his best. Sadly, no.

Scoop is a murder-mystery played for laughs. It loses. Allen has again chosen his Match Point temptress Scarlett Johansson as his female lead.

She's student journalist Sondra Pransky, holidaying in London, staying with her well-to-do English friend Vivian (Romola Garai, wasted in a tiny role) when she stumbles on her first big news scoop. Recently deceased ace reporter Joe Strombel (lovely Ian McShane) has come back from his one-way trip across the Styx River to pass on the scoop of a deathtime. According to his source, the Tarot Card Murderer who has been stalking women in London is actually the aristocratic Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman).

All Sondra has to do is track down Lyman and discover enough evidence to publish her story. With the help of vaudeville magician Splendini, aka Sid Waterman (Allen), she infiltrates the right aristocratic circles and begins an ill-advised romance with Lyman. This movie resembles Match Point in many ways both seem to have an obsession with the aristocracy, murder and beautiful settings in expensive flats and country estates.

Allen's infatuation with English talent also shows up with cameos from actors including Charles Dance, Anthony Head, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Mark Heap, Kevin McNally, and Christopher Fulford. Thinking back to Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery and Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Scoop can't help but pale in comparison. Allen is at his stuttering, irritating, hammy worst as the nervous, bumbling magician who poses as Sondra's dad surely the creepiest father-figure ever, given his romantic history.

His hamminess also seems to infect Jackman and Johansson, who start to stutter occasionally. One gets a disturbing feeling that Allen made this film and designed the plot so he could spend time with the luscious Miss Johansson. He seems to have lost any sense of humour and most of his clever one-liners ("I was born of the Hebrew persuasion, but I converted to narcissism") fall flat through poor delivery.

It is grating how Johansson is forced to prattle out the forced, would-be cute dialogue ("If you put our heads together, you'll hear a hollow noise.") with Allen, in an attempt at comic chemistry. Shouldn't she be spending more time doing that with Jackman?

It hardly matters, however, since all the characters are reduced to mere cardboard cut- outs, and the audience loses interest in the killer's identity long before the weak finale.