Crimes à Oxford

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.

The Oxford Murders is one of a very rare type of movie, I'm not even sure what you would call it. Intellectual Thriller, or maybe Nerd Mystery. Whatever the category, it's one of those thrillers where the leads are so intelligent and inquisitive that they often fly into uncontrollable excitement because of some new bit of mathematical code that just popped into their minds.

It starts out with a great hook – a professor is telling a story to his class about a man who, in the midst of a heated battle, sat down amidst all of the gunfire around him and wrote feverishly in his notebook, because he absolutely had to write down what was in his mind at that very moment. What was so important that he would risk his life?

Much of the first part of the movie is a philosophical discourse which asks us generic existential clichés like Can we know the truth? And how do we really know anything? Elijah Wood stars as Martin, a young American so eager to achieve the answers to these questions that he travels to England with the sole purpose of picking the brain of a Professor Seldom (whose name sounds like it belongs in a Harry Potter story), the man who was giving the lecture at the beginning of the movie.

You see, Martin believes that if we uncover the secret meaning of numbers, we'll know the secret meaning of reality. I'm going to just come right out and say that the movie pretty much lost me at this point. I'm not sure how the meaning of numbers is connected to the meaning of reality, or if the meaning of reality means the meaning of life or just the true nature of our surroundings, and most importantly, I didn't know there was a secret meaning of numbers. In fact, until I saw this movie, I thought that mathematics was a universal language. Maybe I didn't pay enough attention in my college philosophy classes.

Regardless, questions like these soon become of the utmost importance, as a series of murders begin happening that seem to be driven by an intellectual motive. At this point you'll notice that every character's behavior and background is designed to make them a suspect, and the movie literally turns into a game of Clue. During their investigations, Seldom and Martin actually discuss the similarities to Clue and how best to solve the mystery using that format.

To muddle things even further, the movie uses philosophy to stretch reasonable doubt to the absolute extreme. Seldom explains to Martin in dramatically hushed language that no matter how certain and clear and obvious the evidence, we can never be ABSOLUTELY certain who the killer is.

This is the kind of nihilism that leads to the logical conclusion that we should just open all of the prisons and let everyone run free, and maybe even dismantle the entire legal system because, following that logic, it clearly serves no purpose.

But one thing I did love about the movie is how Martin shows up from America, this gigantic math geek if ever there was one, and immediately makes friends with two beautiful girls who immediately fall in love with him. I hate it when that happens! One of them, who he met while playing racquetball, is so stunningly beautiful that it makes no sense when she falls for this guy. She makes Elijah Wood look like a little kid!

I think there's a good sex scene in the movie where you can see her naked, but I missed almost the entire thing because I fainted when she took her shirt off.

There is a complicated and unnecessary back story late in the film about a past student of Seldom's who drove himself insane with his strenuous efforts to answer some of the some of the questions of the universe until he ended up helpless on a hospital bed because his body couldn't keep up with his mind. He loses his legs and his mobility and his sanity and then can't even do better than a hospital that has so little respect for its patients that they would leave a legless man lying naked on his stomach for all to see. Nice.

But in the movie's defense, despite all of the mumbo jumbo throughout the film, the climax is actually pretty good. You may feel completely lost for a good part of the running time unless you have a little background in mathematics and philosophy yourself (I don't).

But unfortunately, they still can't resist handing us a nicely packaged philosophical sound bite to wrap everything up at the end, which creates a little problem. The mystery in the movie has been allowed to solve itself, and to do so in a pretty impressive way, but then they give us an entirely different solution through dialogue – a crazy solution.

I'm willing to bet that this story looked great on paper, but on the screen there is a little too much nonsense to deal with and FAR too much high-brow intellectualism. It's safe to assume that a large portion of the audience will feel pretty alienated. I personally have a tough time relating to characters that get uncontrollably excited about things like historical philosophy and math theory, and an entire movie based on things like this is even more of a challenge.

On the other hand, in a time when our movies are overflowing with stupidity, we should cherish the ones that really try to give us something to think about. But personally I prefer the ones that are just a little more accessible

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.

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.

So what we have here is an British-ish kind of detective story that has an American exchange student in it. That partially, perhaps, causes a strange blend of both American and British features in the movie.

What I really love in British detective stories is that usually they are quite calm, slow and sophisticated. It creates a certain mood to the movies. However, 'The Oxford Murders' basically does its everything to destroy that mood by cinematography that just makes me want to look away. The takes are very much too rapid and hectic. I don't think it suits here at all. This American guy, played by Elijah Wood, also has some sex in the film, which I personally find too intensive for a British detective story. It just doesn't fit there. It felt awkward in this particular film. The movie was directed by a Spanish guy but I believe he knows much stuff about British detective stories if he makes one. The new stuff he tries to pull here doesn't work, though.

Of course there is some good here, too. I love John Hurt's performance. Also the strange mathematics are intriguing, everything I do understand about it whatsoever.

All in all, I'm not sure what kind of game the film makers are playing here. Everything happening on screen is happening too fast and oddly for this genre. I'd love to like this movie more but many details are too out of place and the whole movie is like a terribly played discord with an otherwise beautiful instrument.

5/10