Well-acted crap

Rating: 4/10 (15 December 2006)

Before this film, I hadn't seen many Woody Allen films but they seemed to mix a lot of cringe with humour and some nice observations about People, the general Human Condition, Life, and so on (and on). In Match Point, there is only cringe. No humour, no interesting insights. And most of the cringe is due to the bad script; it starts off with a bit of promise but quickly bogs down into a boring, contrived, predictable, and pretentious waste of a film. And unrealistic through and through: Woody Allen has some pretty weird notions about London and the British (i.e, he apparently has no clue). I really had to struggle to watch it to the end. It also got a lot worse towards the end, as if Woody Allen didn't know how to end it and out of desperation chose an idiotic ending. Or maybe it struck him that the big theme of the film, introduced heavy-handedly at the start of the film, hadn't yet stepped onto the stage, and so contrived an idiotic ending to let the theme get in on the act before curtain's close. And the big theme? That we are at the mercy of Chance ("That's like, deep, man!"). Besides forgetting the theme through most of the film, Woody Allen actually seems to promote the opposite view that Chance can be made redundant by hard work and good sense. At least, the moody main character has to make quite a mess before Chance properly makes her entry. So, Match Point neither entertains nor stimulates, and you can't chill out to it, since you are busy cringing. Having art galleries and operas in it does not make it Art. Nor do the obviously included details. The characters are 1.5-dimensional and pretty uninteresting, and evolve predictably throughout the film, so it is not a good character study. All in all pretty useless film. It could be that Woody Allen is making a public admittance of severe obsessions, through the acts of the main character, who knows. Who cares?
So what makes it worth the four stars I've given it? Well, the photography is pretty nice, and the most of the actors play pretty well, despite the lousy script and the laughable lines. I felt a bit sorry for them but they chose it themselves and get paid handsomely for it, I'm sure. And, of course, there's Scarlett Johansen. She plays very well (as usual) and is very sexy (as usual). But even here, Woody Allen fails miserably. She is in far too few scenes, and vanishes all-together in the last half hour. And, somehow, Woody Allen even manages to neutralize her sexiness at times by putting her into artificial and stilted settings. What a waste.