Scoop: Critic Reviews

A companion piece to Match Point that suffers all the more in comparison.

In his not especially funny yet oddly appealing new comedy, Woody Allen manages to act his age and prove theres life in those old jokes yet.

Scoop is worthwhile viewing for Allen's quips. Just don't expect much of a story.

Scoop is the worst movie Woody Allen has ever made.

It saddens me to report -- Scoop is distinctly minor Allen, with less weight to it than one of his old humor doodles in The New Yorker.

It not only lacks the verve and energy of Allen's best New York-based work, it feels culturally adrift, like some bewildered tourist trying to read a city map held upside down.

To see Allen, now 70, trying to reclaim the persona he's been handing off is like watching Willie Mays fall down trying to hit a curve ball during his last season.

It's full of funny lines and clever inventions.

Scoop, an amiable romp of lighthearted fun.

Some may dismiss Scoop as 'minor Woody Allen' because it doesn't traffic in major psychological probes. But it makes you smile. And that's not such a minor accomplishment.

A romp of a thing, Scoop won't be mistaken for splendid. Yet for diminutive pleasure, the murder- mystery comedy can rightly be called splendini.

Scoop isn't going for complexity. It's a trifle. Like its rootless vaudevillian magician, however, it feels neither here nor there.

One form of low-rent showbiz Allen depicts in Scoop is Fleet Street journalism, but it's depicted with none of the witty rancor or intelligence of Evelyn Waugh's 1937 Scoop.

Cobbled together from memorable parts of Allen's own (not to mention Hitchcock's) classics, Scoop doesn't establish its own identity.

Lack of novelty aside, Scoop is a carefully crafted combination of light suspense and frivolous comedy.

Things don't really get ugly in Scoop, they just feel very familiar very quickly, which doesn't mean it's necessarily bad, just awfully lightweight and terribly unoriginal.

It's a pleasing blend of Abbott and Costello and Foul Play, tickling the audience in all the right spots.

Woody -- enough with the one-liners.

Woody Allen is on a roll. Or maybe I should say he's on a crumpet. After the brilliant Hitchcockian thriller style of Match Point, he's now reverted back to his old wry, dry comedy style in Scoop.

After Woody Allen had made one too many 'serious' films, his devoted fans longed for him to go back to being funny again. Things now have come full circle, for after Scoop, they're going to wish the Woodman would stick to serious drama from now on.

Scoop, a half-baked amalgam of Manhattan Murder Mystery and Curse of the Jade Scorpion -- sadly demonstrates that Allen has lost much of his comic timing both as a director and an actor.

Scoop. It's a tired, thin, almost laughless reminder of the earlier Allen.

If only it were funny instead of just passably amusing, and if only Allen's movies hadn't declined to such a state of rote self-repetition that even passably amusing is tantamount to a compliment.

The movie is watchable, there's the occasional good one-liner, but it's extremely slight, overly drawn out and never for a moment believable.