Murder by Numbers: Movie Review, DVD Review (2002)

9/26/2007 Posted by Admin

Dazed and shooting

(Originally published 2002)

Directed by Barbet Schroeder, written by Tony Gayton, 119 minutes, rated R.

The new Sandra Bullock movie, "Murder by Numbers," features Miss Congeniality herself as a glum San Benito, California policewoman out to solve a murder mystery with no mystery—at least not for audiences, who are handed the answer to the film’s crime right from the start.

As directed by Barbet Schroeder ("Single White Female," "Our Lady of the Assassins") from a screenplay by Tony Gayton, the film is inspired by the real-life Leopold-Loeb case of 1924 and, in turn, by Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope," Richard Fleischer's "Compulsion" and Tom Kalin's "Swoon": It follows two young men trying to outwit the law with a cunning murder.

But that’s where the comparisons end. Unlike those films, "Murder by Numbers" is strictly standard issue, a film whose title not only speaks volumes for its predictable storytelling, but also for Hollywood’s growing cynicism toward those paying its bills. Indeed, if a studio’s sneer could be heard, it would sound an awful lot like "Murder by Numbers."

In the film, Bullock is Cassie Mayweather, a pepperbox-wielding emotional wreck who enjoys her booze and tears almost as much as she enjoys her men. Weighted down with enough emotional baggage to confound even the likes of Oprah's Dr. Phil, Cassie is a woman facing a troubled past—and her own looming psychological collapse.

But when two teen-age boys--the bookish Justin (Michael Pitt) and the wealthy high school stud Richard (Ryan Gosling)--decide to spice up their lives with a little strangulation, amputation, absinthe and murder, Cassie's grimmer-than-grim life gets the unexpected lift it needs.

Along with her new partner, Sam Kennedy (Ben Chaplin), whom she immediately seduces in an awkward yet successful bedroom tumble, Cassie quickly finds herself in the thick of a murder investigation that actually builds to her being mauled by a baboon.

For whatever reason, Schroeder coasts in "Numbers," but he’s too talented to let the film slip entirely away without first delivering a handful of moments that speak for what the film could have been if its script didn’t play it so safely and, yes, by the numbers.

Bullock and Chaplin have no chemistry, but Pitt and Gosling do. What Schroeder gets right are the homosexual undertones between the two--and how one boy’s seduction has the power to lead both into a senseless, irrevocable crime.

Grade: C

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