Woody takes his eye off the ball

Bedroom games: Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers

American critics, who have been more dyspeptic than Europeans about Woody Allen for a good many years, have welcomed his first British film as his best since Crimes and Misdemeanours. It has been lauded as his Hitchcockian thriller par excellence.

Brits have been more doubtful. For me, it is Agatha Christie rather than Hitchcock who springs to mind. This is a well-made film with absolutely no depth and a moral about luck and fate that's essentially tuppence-coloured.

Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is a young man on the make who coaches at a fashionable tennis club. He becomes friends with a rich client (Matthew Goode), gets a well-paid City job, thanks to the client's family, and prepares to marry the daughter of the family (Emily Mortimer).

He is not exactly a bounder, but he does want to have his cake and eat it, too. He falls heavily for a neurotic young actress (Scarlett Johansson) who is his friend's fiancée.

Sex in Allen's films always seems on the edge of parody, as if he is embarrassed to mention it without a bit of a laugh, masking a deep-down shudder.

Here, though, we get the works, which is certainly an improvement and helps to explain the coach's nefarious plan to escape his emotional dilemma. The point of the film is that the plan goes wrong because of the merest twitch of fate or luck. The ball, in fact, falls on the wrong side of the net for him.

If you were to watch Match Point without knowing that it's by Woody, you wouldn't guess it, since there is little of his humour or his once subtle way of looking at human fallibility.

But you might spot that it's not made by an English director: London is presented in almost unrecognisable luxury, with constant operatic trimmings, and none of the solid British stereotypes on display stand up to much psychological inspection.

You also gather that tennis is not Allen's strong point, when someone seriously asks who is the best player between Rusedski and Agassi. Anyone with any doubt about that ought to be led away gibbering.

However decently the film is made, there is something wrong with it from the beginning: a sense that these are characters being carefully manipulated rather than the possessors of real flesh and blood.

Only the bitchy, neurotic Johansson seems to be giving a genuinely three-dimensional performance; though Brian Cox and Penelope Wilton, as scions of the family, do gamely enough.

What Match Point lacks is the depth that might have made the emotional game either believable or moving. Maybe Allen shouldn't write his films any more, at least not in England where his sensibilities seem so oddly blunted.

Match Point
Cert: 12A

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