The Oxford Murders (2008)

Sick Product of a Sick System

I wanted to but couldn't!

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

The problem with this film is that it is quite bad while still having some good acting, looking good, having pretty exciting camera work, and being fairly engrossing. The problem is, you may have been a victim of Faked Engrossment, since nothing pans out to justify such engrossment. I note that the British commentators here are even harder on it than the American ones, but surely a film that has no redeeming qualities (according to both factions) must have something going for it, so let's list some pluses and minuses: 1. The acting is terrific, but only if you are watching John Hurt, Anna Massey and Jim Carter. 2. The acting is dreadful, but only if you are watching Elijah Wood and Leonor Watling. 3. The acting reaches a new nadir of awfulness but only if you are watching Burn Gorman, the only actor I can recall who, seemingly without the aid of make-up, can give Lon Chaney Sr. a run for his money in the looks department, while simultaneously proving to be the legitimate heir of Tod Slaughter where acting style is concerned. 4. The Gorman role is pretty wild and flavorful, yet his character has no bearing on any aspect of the plot. He seems simply there to overact and scare children. 5. The film is set in 1993, with no reason or explanation given for that choice. 6. The Oxford police are the most all-embracing investigators in history, sharing every clue they get with an Oxford professor and student, having them share body viewings in the morgue, murder methods, etc. 7. The intellectual call on the viewer is much too much, with discussions of higher mathematics and philosophy so rarefied that most people will not be able to follow them (although we are assured by more than one British commentator that this stuff is taught them in their cradles; I knew American education lacked something, so I guess I now know what it is). 8. Except for the actors, the film seems to be totally Spanish-made by people who don't speak English (at least if the concluding bonus interviews are any indication), which does not augur well for a story and dialog that are so incredibly English and pseudo-intellectual in concept (although based on a Spanish novel). 9. There is use of obviously really retarded children as a plot device, which reflects credit on absolutely no one. 10. There are really good tracking shots of many of the actors, usually from behind and as they are in a rush to get somewhere, that gives some life to the production. 10. Everybody seems to dislike the Guy Fawkes celebration scene, but it is quite well-filmed, what with a big rooftop chase above while the festivities (including a full chamber orchestra) continue unabated be1ow. 11. Quite honestly, John Hurt seems to be having the time of his life in his role, and it is always enjoyable to watch a great actor enjoying himself (watch Olivier as Richard III for proof). 12. Good mystery stories need long films, as they require considerable set-ups for each character before the fun starts; this doesn't have one, and the characters arrive both fully-formed and fully explained. 13. The denouement is something of a smash-up, but I think I understood it. Still, in an age that thinks that Rap is music, I'm not certain other people would; they should have dumbed it down a little.Okay, with all the above going for or against the film, I still found it totally enjoyable to watch. In fact, I'm going to watch it again this week. And then I'm going to watch it again and again and again, until I am sure I understand it. But a six rating, mostly for John Hurt and the photography.

Well, Oxford reminds me of Hoggwarts and the encrypted messages and symbols make me think to the Dan Brown. But as it deals more with logic and science, it's would be more "Angels & Demons".Actually, despite being French, i got a British chromosome for everything truly Brit rises my interest : Oxford as Cambridge has always been big names for college and one of my regrets in life is that I didn't live a college courses like this: stunning campus, prestigious history, fraternities, night of the prom! French universities lack all this! With this movie, I intended to take a tour inside and I am pleased: reality is always less gratifying than imagination because I found Oxford ancestral and Gothic but also old and not very magical.But the movie is interesting and asks good questions for those who like to ponder: numbers, maths exist by themselves or only in man's mind?For those who like crime stories, I think this movie is rather unique because the twists are really great! At last, the cast is wonderful: Wood as McGuire has good manners thus seem sympathetic fellows, Hurt bears wisely his age and Waitling is hard to forget when like me, you watch the movie on a hot summer night!

I really wanted to like this film, thinking it was an old-fashioned, slow placed and thoughtful alternative to the usual special effects cesspool: using brains, mathematics and philosophy to track down a murderer. American graduate student in Oxford (Wood) has sex right off the boat with a beautiful nurse (Watling) and gets to lodge in a wonderfully eccentric and charming old house with a wonderfully eccentric and charming old woman (Anna Massey), meets eccentric and not so charming fellow student, and gets to meet eccentric and burnt out but still bitingly witty and narcissistic genius (Hurt), who is also the ex-lover of the beautiful nurse with the never-explained accent. We get it. Despite being allegedly built around a weird subset of logical-positivistic philosophy (badly and erroneously summed up by Hurt's public lecture at the beginning), in fact the movie is built around clichés. I don't understand how an allegedly mathematician turned writer could have written such a bad script. I mean, you wouldn't expect a mathematician to describe a sexy love scene, and in fact the lack of chemistry between Wood and Watling is amazing and really, really lust-killing, but to get basic knowledge of the world of mathematical logic wrong is really unsettling. Worse, math is dumbed down. The only thing this script could possibly have going for it is its use of math as a narrative device, yet we see Wood marking up a squash court to calculate better angles of attack. This is supposed to sell us on math? Why is Wittgenstein's Tractatus described as a series of mathematical equations? It's not. Why is Fermat's Last theorem anonymised by presenting it as Bormat's Last Theorem? Was the legal office on the production team somehow afraid that Fermat's descendants would put in a claim for royalties 400 years later if they actually used his name? Why is the real mathematician who finally solved the puzzle in the 1990s, Andrew Wiles, presented as looking like a summer-stock theatre director named Wilkes? Wiles' proof is over a hundred pages long, not something that can be scribbled on a board during a public lecture, though Wiles did give a talk in 1993 at Cambridge, not Oxford, announcing his proof, the same year in which the film is set. Are we supposed to get a secret thrill figuring out the roman-a-clef hints that it's really Fermat, as if that wasn't obvious to 100% of the math and science nerds and MENSA members who would watch a film like this? This is just dumb scripting: seductresses (Watling) have to be incredibly sultry, professors have to have Einstein hair and elbow patches, young and hungry students have to be iconoclasts, and so on. In the end, it's not about the bad math and bad scripting but the bad casting. Wood is not really believable as a would-be Beautiful Mind math genius, Hurt is a prissily theatrical stereotype of the Mad Professor, and Watling is way too sophisticated and sexy to be a believable nurse who melts into a mass of walking pheromones when she catches a glimpse of future Hobbit Wood. The backstories are either simple-minded (Hurt, Massey) or simply banal (Wood, Watling). In the end, the so-called math that is supposed to be the key to unlocking the murder mystery is way less engaging than the word games in The Da Vinci Code. In the end, we have a movie about math and serial killers in which there (SPOILER) no serial killers and no real math.

I have always been a fan of murder mysteries and after seeing the DVD in my video store, I thought the Oxford murders sounded pretty interesting with a slight dan brown edge to it. Having Elijah wood and john hurt in the two lead roles also prompted my interest too. After having watched it, I must say that I wasn't entirely taken with it. The acting was on par and I could sit and listen to john hurts voice all day but the story line was not badly executed but more like sluggishly executed. The script could have done with more tightening up, and a few scenes could have been deleted (such as the awful love scenes between Elijah wood and the actress who plays his love interest) The story has a great premise but that is far as my praise extends. I'm not saying I hate it but its not a film I would willingly go see again.