The magic is missing from Woody Allen's 'Scoop'

Can Woody Allen speak normally anymore? He's famed for his nervous stammer, a device of comic timing owned by the self-styled neurotic. But in the past four comedies in which he's starred, including the new "Scoop," Allen can scarcely spit out a full sentence. He splutters and stutters, sometimes blowing spittle as he strains to articulate a coherent thought or lob a feeble one-liner. If you saw a man behaving this way in real life — all jitters and hand-wrings and manic semaphores — you'd want to know what facility wall he jumped.

Focus Features 'Scoop' 1 out of 5 stars The verdict: A director more out of touch with contemporary life and culture than any filmmaker since Stanley Kubrick. Director: Woody Allen Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Hugh Jackman, Ian McShane, Woody Allen, Kevin McNally Run time: 96 minutes Release date: July 28, 2006 Rating: PG-13 for some sexual content. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate 'Scoop'   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

It wasn't always like this. Allen's persona over the years has calcified into wiggy, overwrought caricature. What we have now is late-era Woody, the Sputter Years. Also known as the Unfunny Period.

A half-baked detective lark, "Scoop" is Allen at his slightest and silliest, a throwaway in the slapdash manner of "Small Time Crooks" and "Hollywood Ending," films almost nobody saw, for good reason. Allen's geriatric moment, the mid-1990s to now, reveal a director more out of touch with contemporary life and culture than any filmmaker since Stanley Kubrick. He presents worlds that bear a patina of familiarity but are cold and waxy to the touch. New audiences, which Allen needs, can't relate.

"Scoop" happens in Allen's sterile, Merchant-Ivory vision of London (as did his "Match Point"), where everyone lives knee-deep in diamonds and fine art on sprawling estates covered with topiaries and windy driveways. It's as though he finds creative refuge in a stereotypical England. His blinkered perception, we suppose, makes it easier for Allen to spin a magical-realist tale of love and murder and the supernatural.

"Match Point's" Scarlett Johansson plays a coltish, not-quite-believable American journalism student, who encounters the ghost of a recently dead London journalist (a growly Ian McShane) when she volunteers for a magician's disappearing-box trick.

On his journey across the river Styx (Woody's idea of whimsy), the dead journalist learns the identity of a serial killer dubbed the Tarot Card Killer. He channels Johansson's green reporter and feeds her clues to crack the case. (The tip-giving ghost is an offshoot of the Humphrey Bogart ghost in Allen's "Play It Again, Sam.")

As the talentless vaudevillian magician, a hopelessly frumpy Allen essentially reprises the huckster showman he played in "Broadway Danny Rose," a frenzy of anxious smarm. He reluctantly joins Johansson in her sleuthing, which leads to a prime suspect, aristocratic beefcake Peter Lyman (a smooth Hugh Jackman), for whom she falls. To much relief, the septuagenarian Allen doesn't again cast himself as a young woman's love interest. In fact, he's completely, and thankfully, sexless here.

A magic act incorporating "real" magic is a conceit Allen floated in "Alice," "Oedipus Wrecks" (his short in "New York Stories") and the almost unwatchable "Curse of the Jade Scorpion," and it still doesn't work. Allen neither questions the sorcery nor takes it seriously, which makes the stories weightless, slightly embarrassing fairy tales.

Even at 96 minutes, the thinly imagined, visually indifferent "Scoop" feels drawn-out and tired. Allen's bumbling energy provides a semblance of bounce — his classic self-deprecation ("Honey, excitement for me is dinner without heartburn") yields a wan grin or two — but the film's slackness reasserts gravity with a hard clunk, and a fuddled stammer.