Scoop Review

Nothing here carries the nerve of Match Point, which the same director shot in the same city a year earlier, and the drop is not only a matter of genre. Scarlett Johansson is asked to play a fast-talking screwball reporter and keeps reaching for a rhythm that is not in her, squinting behind a pair of glasses that stand in for an entire character.

Allen casts himself as a card-trick hack called Sid Waterman and hands his own stammering patter to a man who never stops talking, which turns every second scene into a nightclub act that has run past its time. Ian McShane, playing a reporter who has died and slipped off the boat of the dead, gives the film its only real jolt and then leaves.

Jackman gets the thankless job, since Peter Lyman has to be charming enough to seduce and blank enough to stay suspicious, so he plays the part as a well-tailored absence. Remi Adefarasin photographs the country houses and the river with genuine warmth. The mystery itself is solved by luck and a bathtub, and the reveal lands with no accumulated dread behind it. What stays with you is the sense of a filmmaker amusing himself on location.