Like last year's Match Point, Woody Allen's new movie Scoop is set in tony London, where murders of convenience play out in sunlit urban habitats and impeccably groomed estates. And again, Scarlett Johansson is playing an American interloper. There the similarities end. Match Point was slick, a film that politely looked the other way as you began to sympathize with the lead character's alternating lust for and horror of women (an ambivalence that ends in homicidal panic). Scoop is a screwball murder mystery—frequently funny, but somehow less fun.

Johansson plays Sondra Pransky, a bespectacled journalism student whose attempts to deploy her feminine wiles tend to go awry. Then she's stuffed into a closet by a magician named Splendini (Woody Allen), AKA Sid Waterman, who is attempting to make her disappear, and while she's in there a hot tip comes to her straight from the ghost of a deceased reporter on his way to hell. When Sondra emerges from the chamber, visibly shaken, she thinks she knows the identity of London's prostitute-murdering Tarot Card Killer.

Soon Sondra and Sid traipse into the life of their number one suspect, the son of a certain Lord Lyman. (Their strategy involves a staged drowning, which would be hot, except that this time Allen has cast himself as Johansson's father figure and he seems suddenly averse to exposing her daughterly flesh.) There are garden parties, and there are cocktail parties, and there are painful puns (trollop/Trollope, Reubens/Rubens) and other jokes that you will find funny if you like Woody Allen. It's pleasant, but it's no Match Point.

annie@thestranger.com