Scoop

Woody Allen’s latest adventure comes by way of an offbeat mystery that blurs the lines between the living and dead. Allen plays a bumbling American magician in London who meets Scarlett Johansson’s Sondra Pransky when she is pulled up on stage during one of his acts. Inside a magic box, she sees the spirit of a recently departed journalist—a great investigator who has gotten his last big scoop in the land of the undead. Pransky is a student journalist on holiday in London, and in her amateurish way, goes about investigating handsome aristocrat Peter Lymon (Hugh Jackman) in the case of the Tarot Card serial killer. She drags Allen’s Sid Waterman along to help her get the facts, and on the way finds herself falling for Lymon. Scoop is a delightful little mystery, filled with Allen’s brand of humor and suspense (just watching him trying to snoop around is enough to make you bite all your nails off). He and Johansson work well together and both have an air of naiveté that’s perfect for their roles as amateur investigators. The only part that bothered me was Pransky’s journalistic ethics, but once I suspended my belief, I found the film both charming and intriguingly different from other, more traditional mystery flicks.