James Wolcott nails precisely what's so rancid about Woody Allen's Match Point, in particular what's so painful about Scarlet Johannsen:

Johanssen really can not act except in brief moues. Usually it doesn’t matter, because the camera feeds on her pillowy features and (male) viewers project smoldering passion into her jug-like passivity. In Lost in Translation, Bill Murray was so overstocked with ennui that her youth came across as the vitality he was missing, never mind that she also seemed anesthetized. Here, surrounded by real actors, she sounds like a toneless amateur rattling off the stock dialogue Allen writes for young actresses; she doesn’t even bring the sly attack Juliette Lewis did to her writing-student role in Husbands and Wives (her chatty, pseudo-feminist critique of Woody’s novel in the cab was a masterpiece of destructive criticism—in which she took such sly delight!). Emily Mortimer is so charming and vivid as Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s girlfriend (later, wife)—so outclasses Johannsen’s character—that the only plausible reason he’d cheat on her is because Johannsen is American and blonde, her nookie pure Hollywood gold; Woody’s shiksa fascination in action.