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It doesn't add up
[Photo: Warner Bros]
Ben Chaplin, left, and Sandra Bullock are on the trail of a killer in Murder By Numbers. |
By PHILIP BOOTH, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 18, 2002
Sandra Bullock stars as a detective investigating a seemingly perfect crime in Murder by Numbers, but her character isn't as interesting as the pair of teenage killers.
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So this is what happens to latchkey kids, all grown up. Two "orphans with credit cards," as they're described in the crime thriller Murder by Numbers, are so bored with their lives that they plan and execute a so-called perfect murder, just for the fun of it. And they gain even greater satisfaction from their evil act by keeping quiet when an innocent man is blamed for the crime.
Sadly, truth is uglier than fiction: The latest morality play from Reversal of Fortune director Barbet Schroeder was inspired by real-life events, including the Dartmouth murders of 2000 (a pair of teenagers killed two professors), the infamous Leopold-Loeb case of the 1920s and the bloodcurdling events described in the pages of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.
Schroeder and screenwriter Tony Gayton (The Salton Sea) might also have been inspired by Hitchcock's Rope, released in 1948 and based loosely on the Leopold-Loeb case. Murder by Numbers, like the earlier film, concerns a pair of young men who experience a kind of erotic bonding because of their shared responsibility for a murder, their pride in avoiding detection and their unstated, repressed compulsion to take credit for the act.
Richard Haywood (Ryan Gosling of The Believer) is the rich, smug, conventionally good-looking half of the dysfunctional duo in this version of the story, while Justin Pendleton (Michael Pitt of Hedwig and the Angry Inch) is the bookish loner, needy and troubled and less despicable than his manipulative friend. Or so it would seem.
A story centered on the complicated relationship between these two California high-schoolers, and the social forces that shaped their amoral sensibilities, might have been intriguing. But Sandra Bullock is star and executive producer here, so much of the plot is given over to her character, efficient but troubled homicide detective Cassie Mayweather, and her partner, Sam Kennedy (Ben Chaplin), new to the job after a stint as a vice cop.
Murder by Numbers consequently sags when the film shifts away from Richard and Justin. The police-procedural material is fairly bland, largely because we've all been here before: Cassie is tough, but, uh, vulnerable, terrific at what she does but a mess on the domestic front, with skeletons that refuse to remain in her closet.
She's also an odd bird, making her home in a houseboat, whiling away her off hours watching TV's Matlock and practically pouncing on a date. And, yeah, her boss (R.D. Call) threatens to force her into a leave of absence after she refuses to quit working on a murder case that's officially been solved.
The flip side of this standard-issue television material is a focus on the method by which Richard and Justin carry out their malevolent plan. The cops' description of the murder is cross cut with scenes of the deed, and we also see flashbacks of the trauma once suffered by Cassie; some of this might better have been left to the imagination. Schroeder instead attempts to make viewers feel complicit. It makes for a clumsy, less-than-satisfying mix of elements.
* * *
- Grade: B-
- Director: Barbet Schroeder
- Cast: Sandra Bullock, Ben Chaplin, Ryan Gosling, Michael Pitt, Agnes Bruckner, Chris Penn
- Screenplay: Tony Gayton
- Rating: R (graphic violence; sexual situations; profanity)
- Running time: 120 min.
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