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| Murder by Numbers |
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  (4/10)
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Runtime: 120 |
| Public Rating: 2.71 (21 votes) |
Director: Barbet Schroeder |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Thriller |
Year: 2002 |
| Writer(s): Tony Gayton |
| Reviewed by: Oktay Ege Kozak |
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“Murder by Numbers” is a thriller that consists of cleverly written and executed scenes, nicely composed characters and carefully constructed plot points. Of course, that doesn’t mean that these elements are transcribed to us with a sense of balance. When you look at its shell plot, the movie tells the story of two teenagers who, with the aid of the psychological emptiness they feel inside and the amount of irresponsibility their society awaits from them, decide to kill some one simply because they think they are smart enough to get away with it and it succeeds in conveying that aspect. My main problem with it is that it pulls away from its focal point and gives way too much screen time to its detective character Cassie Mayweather, making me divide my attention far enough for me to not care about it characters anymore. The movie opens with a very carefully written and nicely acted scene where the teenagers plot on how they are planning to kill an innocent victim. Then, in the next scene, we meet the detective and in a short while, the movie starts to focus on her strange love life with her partner, her troubled past and her character traits so much that when a short scene that involves the teenagers finally arrive, I had to remind myself of the previous expositional scenes to keep track of its main plot. Usually, when a murder thriller such as this involves psychologically driven, brutal and unmotivated murders, the movie follows the exploits of its killer or killers and makes us somehow identify with them while forcing us to ask ourselves questions that we don’t want any answers to and after some time, it introduces a main character to solve these crimes and usually this calm and collected person represents the only sane character in the mad house that we have been pulled upon. “Murder by Numbers”, on the other hand, doesn’t trust its characters far enough to let us in this madhouse in the first place therefore forces us to look at it from a stranger’s standpoint and instead of carefully investigating its subject matter and giving us something to discuss about, it turns into a typical, mildly entertaining thriller that involves a tacky shoot-out scene, a cliffhanger and a surprise finale that wasn’t completely necessary.
Direction: I don’t think anyone could fully associate Barbet Schroeder, an acclaimed director who should have been retired by now, into a certain type of genre filmmaking. He is a very versatile director who has made very different movies in type, tone or budget. Schroeder’s career spans low-budget guerilla films like “Our Lady of the Assasins”, powerful drama films like “Reversal of Fortune” and “More” and not-so-great thrillers like “Kiss of Death” and “Single White Female”. Although it involves a very powerful and stylistically engaging opening shot, “Murder by Numbers”, with its almost typical made for T.V. direction and its cheap looking ending, belongs in the last category.
Acting/Characters: Sandra Bullock, who hasn’t portrayed a troubled masculine FBI agent since “Miss Congeniality”, manages to convey some believability in her character without turning her into a caricature but still comes up with a character that can not manage to relate herself with the subject matter of the plot simply because she herself is given so much non-related stuff to do. Ben Chaplin, who I liked since “The Thin Red Line”, portrays the shy but subversive partner of Bullock with a quite sense of originality suggesting some form of role reversal bur he also crumbles under the script’s outward style. Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt “become” the killer teenagers, conveying them on to the screen with a sense of calm eccentricity that doesn’t ooze into unrelenting and erratic psychopathic characterizations but they soon become obsolete because of the movie’s unrelenting quest to convey some sort of sympathy for its main female character.
The Movie: If “Murder by Number” was shot as an independent film that could have transferred its violence without a sense of self-censorship, that was focused on getting into the mindset of its realistic characters and that didn’t involve a main character who doesn’t go to the scene of a murder crime with a perfect looking hairstyle and full on make-up (Marge Gunderson from “Fargo” is a great example of that), it could have been a special piece of film. But with the way it is today, it cannot go far from being a typical thriller that focuses on all the wrong places. During one scene of the movie, when Cassie Maywheather calls the victim by her first name, her supervisor warns her by saying “You should identify with the killer. Not with the victim”. I don’t think there is another movie in the world that manages to so perfectly explain its biggest problem within itself.
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