Match Point - **1/2

If you're a Woody Allen fan, take all that buzz you're hearing that the Woodman's latest, Match Point, finds him back at the top of his game with a grain of salt. And make it a big grain of salt - like about as big as a tennis ball, an appropriate size for a movie that takes the bounce of a ball as its central metaphor about luck.

Yes, the London(!)-set thriller is Allen's best movie in years, but that's kind of like claiming that Patrick Swayze's forthcoming rap song will be his biggest hit since "She's Like The Wind." It's not exactly high praise. OK, I realize comparing Woody Allen's movies to Patrick Swayze's, well, anything is a very low blow, but I think I'd rather sit through Road House or Red Dawn than anything Allen has put out in, oh, the last decade and a half or so.

Quick. Let's play a little word association with the five most recent Woody Allen movies:

Melinda and Melinda (2004) = Terrible
Anything Else (2003) = Godawful
Hollywood Ending (2003) = Mediocre
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2002) = Pudding
Small Time Crooks (2001) = Stunk

Those words aren't pretty, are they? Well, with the exception of "pudding," which is a delicious, underappreciated dessert that has nothing at all to do with The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. But, hey, I'm hungry.

The point is that even though Match Point is, in fact, Woody Allen's best movie in recent years, it's still far from great. And it's nowhere near as entertaining or as interesting as Allen's best movies, a list that, in my book, includes no less than three bona fide masterpieces in Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hannah and Her Sisters and Annie Hall.

Perhaps hoping to shake out of his slump, the famously Manhattan-centric director has shifted the action in Match Point from the Upper East Side to London, where a struggling Irish tennis pro named Chris (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) takes a job teaching the game to upper crust Brits at a stuffy tennis club. In short order, the up-from-his-bootstraps Chris meets Tom, whose wealthy family sports enormous assets, including Tom's sister Chloe, who immediately falls for Chris.

Sensing a shot at upward mobility, Chris rushes the net, marries Chloe and takes a job working as a financial analyst at one of her father's many companies. Things begin to get complicated, though, when Tom's fiance, a sultry struggling American actress named Nola (Scarlett Johannson) enters the picture. Chris is immediately infatuated with Nola, and the two strike up a torrid affair that intensifies once Tom breaks off the engagement. And by torrid, I mean the kind that begins with Chris and Nola wrestling around the muddy English countryside in the middle of a driving rainstorm and ends with ... well, I suppose I shouldn't tell you that, should I? Let's just say it ends badly.

Match Point looks great, and not just because it features the increasingly radiant Johannson, who makes for a perfect femme fatale, and Rhys-Meyers, whose most recognizable previous role was as the soccer coach in Bend it Like Beckham. Allen's script and direction combine to build a cool noir vibe, and when the movie really works - like in a scene when Chris and Nola verbally joust over a late afternoon pint at a pub - it crackles.

But I was distracted by the fact that Allen has lifted the movie's plot directly from one of the subplots of the aforementioned Crimes and Misdemeanors. In fact, substitute London for New York and make the characters involved younger, and you're left with the exact same moral dilemma at the center of each movie. But where Allen turned Crimes and Misdemeanors into a chilling examination of guilt, compromise and the fallacy of absolute morality, in Match Point he takes the same quandary and delivers the chills, but not the examination. The result is a finely crafted Hitchcockian thriller that keeps you guessing, but leaves you empty. It entertains but - unlike Allen's greatest work - never enriches.