via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood
Scarlett Johansson is Sondra Pranksy, a bubbly, inquisitive student attempting to unravel the mystery of the 'tarot card killer'. Sondra attends a magic show starring Sid Waterman (Woody Allen) and, invited onto the stage, she partakes in a vanishing trick. Subsequently, she's visited by the ghost of Lovejoy (Ian McShane). Lovejoy appears and gives Sondra the scoop of the decade. He informs The Other Boleyn Girl that it is in fact Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) who is the 'tarot card killer'. So, The Girl with the Pearl Earring goes in search of this, 'the scoop of the decade', and in finding Wolverine she falls in love with him. Hugh Jackman's character is buff, so it doesn't matter if it's obvious that he's the killer. In the mean time, magician Sid Waterman is doing card tricks and sometimes he's left alone to joke with himself. He isn't making cutesy attempts at breaching the fourth-wall or anything. In fact, it's not quite clear what he's doing. Thus does that very same confusion seep into this review.
In The Guardian's G2 supplement last May critic Joe Queenan wrote an article entitled 'Europe, please stop funding this man'. This man is Woody Allen. Queenan was pleading with European film companies to stop falling for Allen's ploys. The article gives the sense of Allen as a criminal on the run from the American intellectual hegemony, a bit like Roman Polanski steering clear of U.S. borders. It's like Allen is an infection, and Europe now has an itchy rash:
The ex cathedra pronouncement that Woody Allen comedies were no longer in vogue came as no great shock to most regular moviegoers, and certainly not to people under the age of 30 (sticklers who prefer comedies that are actually funny), as it had been widely reported in other outlets that the once-revered actor/ writer/director hadn't made a film worth seeing in years, and nothing vaguely approaching the quality of Annie Hall, Broadway Danny Rose, Manhattan, The Purple Rose of Cairo, or even Bullets Over Broadway. People didn't talk about Woody Allen movies any more, not even people who had been breathlessly waiting for his latest release since their university days.
By watching Scoop you can see Queenan's point. It's peculiar to think that Woody Allen directed Manhattan, a paean to that part of New York, shot in glorious black and white film stock and underwritten with a Gershwin score. It's peculiar that Allen is that same director because Scoop is so bad. The quality of the camera work is dire, not that the movement of the camera was ever the most important part of an Allen film, the script or witty improvisation always was a greater pull. It's also to do with the acting too, which is diabolical. Scarlett Johansson has one mood - inquisitive - and it doesn't matter if she's pretty, she's not worth watching. Her character is supposed to be annoying and is thus even more annoying. Her closest friend Vivian (Romola Garai) is a young woman who talks simply of 'fit blokes', prancing around like the secondary school drama student that she is. Sorry, but middle class, posh London girls don't act like this. They're irritating, yes, but never wooden.
Scoop plays like a poor Three Men and a Little Lady (Emile Ardolini, 1990), at least that has some humour in it, at least something is at stake (classic altar chasing stuff). Allen is annoying here, it's sad to watch, in that it's embarrassing. Indeed, the obligatory middle-to-upper-class English country house scene is awful, and Wolverine has never looked so relaxed. He's better with mutton chops on his face, cutting people. It remains to be seen whether Allen has 'returned to form' with Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2009), but any upward curvature is no excuse for this bore-fest.
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