Los crímenes de Oxford

I had high hopes for "The Oxford Murders", a new Straight-to-DVD film starring Elijah Wood and John Hurt, and most of those hopes were slowly let down as I watched the movie.

The film follows Martin (Wood), an American who travels to Oxford to write his thesis under the legendary mathematician Arthur Seldom (Hurt), and finds an angry, pompous old man instead of the wise and caring fellow he had imagined. Disillusioned, Martin is about to return home when he and Seldom find a dead body. The rest of the film covers Martin and Seldom's race against time to find the killer, using the mathematical theories that both are knowledgeable about.

The film is pretty bland. It's characters, save the amazing John Hurt, are one-dimensional. Martin is boring and unengaging and Elijah Wood does nothing to improve his script. The same can be said of Julie Cox and especially Leonar Watling. John Hurt is the only reason I finished, really. His acting skill is not at home in the world of blandness.

You could do better than "The Oxford Murders", but if you're not looking for too much it will suffice.

A murder mystery that is impossible to figure out because of glaring plot holes, even after rewatching. Confusing editing and unnecessary (uncomfortable) distracting sex scenes. Did this movie take place over 3 days or 3 months? I really can't tell. Tried very hard to be clever and ended up being disappointing. Skip this one.

Since previous reviews are visible it is impossible to write one as if casting a virgin glance to the movie reviewed. It is obvious that the majority of the reviews was negative although the overall ratings were not that bad.I have to say that the movie was tolerable and and even enjoyable and I think that negative criticism stemmed from the fact that the cast and the locale as well as the intellectual pretensions of the movie raised expectations that could not be met. It is very common from my experience that when films deal with weighty matters such as mathematics, philosophy or religion they do so in a schematic and simplified manner and that applies also to movies that were successes such as The Name of the Rose or The Da Vinci Code. I can not find a way that such matters could be worked out and presented in a movie that has to last for about two hours approximately in any other manner that would appear anything but schematic and frivolous to someone who has personal experience or knowledge of such matters-movies are entertainment an not mathematical treatises or religious tracts and therefore simplification is a structural deficiency of this artistic medium cosubstancial with it and impossible to overcome. Therefore do not blame someone for something he can not deliver because of his nature.

Criticisms have been leveled against the characters and actors. Some people found that Wood was not attractive enough to find a sexual partner-as he did in the movie. Who is to judge that. By that logic beautiful people-whatever that means- should mate only with their kind-something that everyday experience denies. The inspector appeared as silly to some- well after all as in the book he did not find the real solution! The Russian student appeared as a caricature but after all that was the choice made by the movie-maker. As for the professor, well what can I say he was professorial and coming from a more traditional country in my experience professors are expected to act in a rather uppish manner.

The central riddle of the movie became crystal clear to me when I read the book because truly filmic time is to fast for me in order to be able to comprehend mysteries and their solutions and that is a general experience I have with films probably due to my lack of visual intelligence and comprehension.

I liked the sexy appearance of Lorna and I think it added to the movie as a diversion from the platitudinous philosophizing of some of the central characters.I think the movie had some sex, a little mathematics, some academia, a bit of mystery, the allure of a historic university town and a final twist of the plot-not that bad after all.

Philosophy, mathematics & logic, Oxford University, murder, intellectuals … all the components that one could hope for in a cerebral, cozy British murder mystery. I, like several others who have written reviews, had high hopes for what would be served up, but ended up disappointed.

The genuinely famous "Fermat's Last Theorem" mysteriously became "Bormat's Last Theorem," which was somewhat indicative of much of the flimflam & fakery that enveloped the movie. The whole production was buried in pseudo intellectualism, name-dropping (numerous mathematicians, logicians & philosophers who would probably have preferred, like Fermat, that their names had been changed to protect their reputations) and contrived clues that depended on parsing a presumed mathematical/logical series. Beneath it all there was a plot that might have qualified for a mediocre episode of Midsomer Murders or Columbo, but would hardly engage the "little grey cells" of even Hercule Poirot.

Martin (Elijah Wood) and Arthur Seldom (John Hurt) spend a good deal of their time shouting at one another (and various other people) in ersatz academic one-upmanship, apparently on the assumption that the louder you are, the more convincing your dubious thinking must be. More alarming, Martin felt compelled to dash from pillar to post every few minutes, frequently colliding with other people carrying books or papers that went flying in the air. Rather unconvincing romantic couplings and consequent jealousies seemed totally disconnected from the rest of the story. Towards the end we were even treated to a rather tepid car chase and fiery bus crash in a vain effort to heighten the drama.

This is a case where less would have certainly been more. Too much was thrown in, in an attempt to elevate a trite and poorly concocted plot with a cloak of intellectualism and atmospherics. Too many unhinged and bipolar characters were floating about. It all seemed to be a hodgepodge of distractions aimed at concealing the absence of substance.

It just never came together.

This film would appear to be a case where a well-intentioned producer, or enclave of producers, noticed a public interest in conceptually high-toned and seemingly erudite subject matter, combined with more staid pop story elements, like serial murder (Se7en) or overcoming emotional/psychological issues (Good Will Hunting/A Beautiful Mind).

The problem appears to be that they turned the screen writing job over to hacks.

I know that's a brutal thing to say, but it really does appear to be the case.

The film tries to wed serial murder and academic philosophical musing, but fails. Actually, it tries to bring quite the plethora of de rigueur elements together, and mismanages the whole affair. You have all kinds of messy stuff, and an absence of any really compelling myth to bind it together, or even to effectively humanize the characters. You have John Hurt striving valiantly to imbue each scene he works with warmth and sensitivity, but he fails against the tide of bad overall conception/development. Suddenly, Wood is dallying with his hostess' daughter. Where did that come from? Then, she's mad at him for arriving home late. Was she expecting him? Later, she apologizes, and they seem to have arrived at some kind of cozy platonic status quo. Why? And she plays the cello. Uh, are we supposed to assume that an interest in contemporary orchestral ensemble work functions as a hedge against emotional irrelevancy? This was all fast, senseless, and just one example of many, many instances where presumably emotionally resonant moments float in a mutually disconnected vacuum.

And speaking of resonant moments, it's possible that some directorial stringency might have redeemed the script somewhat, though I'm not sure. It appears to be a case where the director accepted the script as-is, directed individual scenes as best as possible, then handed the footage over to editing; maybe they could make sense where he couldn't. There really seemed to be only the faintest glimmer of an understanding of any kind of move toward a redemptive overall storyline. I guess I'm saying that the narrative buck needed to have stopped with the narrators, but instead got passed, ineffectually, along the line in the process, until we see the buck being passed right out our screens and into our laps: The narrators didn't know what they were after--or didn't have the craft to pull it off--could the director handle it? The director couldn't handle it; could the editors make up for the oversight? The editors tried as best they could; if they can't make gold out of shite footage, could the viewer kindly oblige and dig something meaningful out of this morass of disconnected emoting interlaced with disconnected pedantry? By now, I think you get the idea. Seriously: If you're an aspiring screenwriter, WATCH THIS MOVIE. I daresay it's a textbook case.

I'm just having one more thought. It is *just possible* that the script is OK, but we're actually witnessing a combination of bad direction and editing mangling it. I would guess it's unlikely, but it *is* possible.