Woody Allen's Scoop is the comic obverse of Match Point (2005). It is a slight and ephemeral comedy that starts with the unlikely appearance of a ghost during the middle of a magician’s act and ends with the solution to a murder. Woody Allen must have conceived of these two films as a pair.

Everyone jokes about how Allen always places himself in his films in close proximity to beautiful young women. The accusation is not entirely fair, though it is not inaccurate either. He is hardly the only filmmaker or writer to imagine his aging self in the arms of youth. In Scoop, the young woman is the most fetching Scarlett Johansson, playing a student journalist named Sondra Pransky on holiday in England. Allen plays a whacked and eccentric aging magician named the Great Splendini, aka Sid Waterman.

They first meet when she attends his magic show, and he chooses her from the audience to play a part in a disappearing trick. During the middle of the trick, while Sondra is hiding in a closet from which she is supposed to disappear, the ghost of a recently dead journalist appears and tells her that a rich aristocrat is a notorious serial killer. Sid sees the ghost as well, and as a result he and Sondra team up to investigate the ghost’s story. They make the kind of kooky detective team we saw played by Allen and Diane Keaton in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993).

Scoop makes a great joke out of the age difference between Sondra and Sid, and though he may feel her attraction, she has no interest in him at all and instead masquerades for much of the film as his daughter.

As the foregoing summary suggests, just about everything in the film is silly and improbable, and every scene in which he appears gives Allen a chance to do his shtick as the doddering, semi-competent Splendini, who has memorized a limited set of lines, which he repeats throughout the film as he performs bad magic tricks in one setting after another: “I love you, really. With all due respect, you're a beautiful person. You're a credit to your race.” Allen makes fun of himself throughout the film and has a great time doing it.

Allen and Johansson don’t take their characters very seriously. Both characters are fairly dimwitted. They stumble around throughout the film, bumbling into each other and ultimately into the actual truth of the mystery they’re investigating. At one point, Johansson jokes that “If we put our heads together, it would make a hollow sound.”