Scoop

I am the first to admit I am a Woody Allen novice. I was born after Manhattan and Annie Hall, often regarded as his masterpieces. Fair enough, they very well may be – it’s just I haven’t seen them. Nor have I seen Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanours, Husbands and Wives, nor any other films in his bulging back catalogue. The guy’s obviously prolific. But there’s an old adage that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

The first Woody Allen movie I sat the whole way through was last year’s Match Point, and that’s two hours of my life I sent packing straight to hell to rot forever. I abhorred the movie – I thought it was pretentious, badly-written, poorly-acted, full of plot holes and weak characters, and extremely sexist in its portrayal of women. Others hailed it as his return to form. Again, fair enough, given his output in the late 90s, perhaps it was. All I can judge is his latest efforts.

Scoop is Allen’s follow-up to Match Point, and like that film, it’s set in England. However, this one’s a comedy – although I declared Match Point to be laughable it was technically a dramatic thriller. Scarlett Johannsen (I’ll get to this perky pin-up later) plays Sandra Persky, a New York journalism student studying in London. She gets the scoop of a lifetime when the spirit of recently deceased investigative reporter Joe Strombel appears to her while she’s being “disappeared” as part of a magic show. She then enlists the help of the magician Sid Waterman to help her find out whether well-connected politician-to-be Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman) is in fact a serial killer.

From the start this film is full of plot holes and terminally unfunny moments. The gag of the dead reporter sneaking off Death’s boat as it crosses the River Styx is cute, but it’s not enough to sustain the gag, especially once Strombel starts appearing wherever he likes, only to state half-way through the film that ‘Oh no! This is finally it!” when his usefulness as a plot device was obviously finished. Sandra’s burgeoning romance with the aristocratic Lyman is Mills & Boon unrealistic – she jumps in front of him wearing a swimsuit in all the right places and then bang, he’s falling for her. Sandra has all the verbal diarrehoea of Allen’s magician character (which is just Allen really). That helps to establish a bond between the two - especially after she starts telling Lyman he’s her father – but after a while is simply annoying. The movie tries to twist and turn to make its story make sense and have some sort of dramatic climax, but the timeline is all wrong, there’s a half-resolution three-quarters through the film and it just doesn’t stack up.

As for Hugh Jackman – why, dear God, why? It says something about the film when Hugh’s performance in the outrageously camp Van Helsing is more entertaining that this. He’s not terribly bad, he’s just given nothing to work with except a few well-cut suits and an accent that could melt butter. And melt butter it does, as Sandra, pretending to be someone else named Jade, falls further in love with the man she’s supposed to be spying on, who could in fact be a serial murderer. I honestly don’t get what everyone else seems to see in Scarlett Johannsen. Sure, she’s a looker, and harks back to the glamourous days of the 40s and 50s when full-lipped, full-hipped women could be movie stars. She was promising in Lost in Translation, boring in Match Point, absolutely woeful in The Black Dahlia, and little more than cute here in Scoop. There are worse actors out there, but I just don’t think we should be hailing her as the next Cate Blanchett just yet.

I began this review by stating my novice status in the world of Woody Allen. There are probably rules somewhere that state you can’t be a movie buff without having seen at least five of his “masterpiece” films. But all I can judge are the two movies of his I have seen, and I’m afraid they don’t leave me with much desire to go track down his other work. But if you do want to watch a Woody Allen comedy, may I suggest hiring out one of his older efforts, as at least you might get to see him firing on all channels, instead of the hit and miss affair that is Scoop.