Match Point

Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Scarlett Johansson step into dangerous territory.

Herald rating: * * *

Woody Allen, comedian, was always a tragedian goofing around a bit. His characters' bedtime reading is Dostoevsky (a character in this movie asks another whether she's seen his copy of Strindberg) and in sassy one-liners or in bleak, uninflected pronouncements, he's made it plain that he sees the world through the nihilist's lens - as a place where virtue is rebuked and evil rewarded, though neither of those outcomes may be depended on.

Crimes and Misdemeanors, Allen's thematically meaty 1989 film and one of his best, was the story of a man whose ordered life is upended when a secret lover is no longer happy to settle for silence. This is, too, but it is narrated more ponderously and without the astringent parallel subplot involving Allen himself. It's as if Allen, now in his seventies and with almost 40 features behind him, can revisit earlier preoccupations but has nothing new to say about them.

That said, this is easily as interesting as anything Allen's done in a decade, even if its only jokes are of the bleakest kind ("They met in a traffic accident"). The title tells us it's about life as a tennis match but the old cynic isn't about to claim that power, skill and guile make for victory. In an opening sequence - what in a novel would be an epigraph - the ball hits the net cord and what happens next is blind luck.

Certainly luck is on the side of Chris Wilton (Rhys-Meyers), a pro player tired of the tour, who applies for a coaching job at an exclusive London club. In short order, this son of poor Irish parents has insinuated himself (or been inserted) into the life of a megarich London family. He's engaged to the daughter (Mortimer), employed by the father (Cox) and in love with the son's American blond and dangerous fiancee, Nola Rice (Johansson). Bad stuff happens.

Rhys-Meyers plays the upwardly mobile Chris as an enigma: is he just a lucky man or a smiling psychopath like Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley? What's chillingly effective is that, much as we may disapprove of his actions we find ourselves siding with him - or at least hoping he doesn't get caught.

To satisfy English funders, the film is set and shot in London which is remarkable because Allen never leaves New York (September, set in Vermont, was shot in Manhattan studios). English critics have sneered at the losses in translation - it's not "the" Tate Modern - but, as the New York Times remarked, Allen's films were always set in a "fantasy Manhattan".

The film's more fundamental flaws are its implausibilities (would a tycoon casually employ such an obvious arriviste?) and characters (Nesbitt plays an English cop plainly written by an American). Chris, too, is rather irritatingly opaque but this suits a thriller that is, in the end, more Hitchcock than Dostoevsky. Evil, Allen tells us, can triumph. But there's no pleasure in victory. It's just luck.

CAST: Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode, Brian Cox, Penelope Wilton, James Nesbitt
DIRECTOR: Woody Allen
RUNNING TIME: 124 mins
RATING: M, contains violence and sex scenes
SCREENING: All cinemas, from Thursday