Perhaps the director was overwhelmed by star and co-producer Sandra Bullock. By all accounts she’s a … er, feisty lady.
Murder by Numbers is practically filmmaking by numbers. It features
two storylines, neither of them original.
The first has to do with two bored schoolboys who decide to commit a murder for vague reasons that have something to do with Nietzsche, if I got that right. It wasn’t exactly clear. Then again, one of them is seen reading a volume of Rimbaud, and the other smokes cigarettes, so I should have known all was not well with them.
The two boys, Richard (Ryan Gosling) and Justin (Michael Pitt) are both the semi-neglected scions of well-off families. They are contrasted, in the movie, by making one of them a blond womaniser and giving the other a floppy fringe and a slight air of effeminacy (he’s the one who reads Rimbaud, obviously). The suppressed homoeroticism here is presumably intentional. They are murderers,
after all.
This plot strand recycles the story of the Leopold-Loeb killing that so shocked the United States in the 1920s: two young upper-class lads decided to do someone in just for the hell of it. This event has been the subject of several movies: Compulsion (1959), Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and the revisionist Swoon (1992) spring instantly to mind.
That storyline is reasonably well done, with competent though annoying acting from Pitt and Gosling. The other, intersecting storyline is about the cop investigating the murder. She, Cassie Mayweather (who thinks of these names?), is played by Bullock, and she has to bear the weight of a large load of cop-movie and television clichés. Yes, she’s a woman, so her sexual forthrightness and casual cruelty to her partner (Ben Chaplin) are meant to surprise, but otherwise she’s pretty much like every other maverick but dedicated cop who got on to a case, got “too involved”, got taken off the case, but pursued it in his or her spare time … and caught the killers.
We’ve seen all this before, many times over. Murder by Numbers even has a police chief who shouts things like “You’re getting too involved!” and “This case is closed! Closed!” while ordering Cassie to take time off — now.
The movie has nothing to say about how two intelligent and apparently sensitive young men reach the point of deliberately inflicting harm on someone else. Is it just having too much money? They barely have backgrounds at all, so there is little context. At least they’re not Jewish. Cop Cassie’s back-story is filled in more comprehensively, but it is also desperately hackneyed. Guess why she feels so strongly about murdered women?
By the time one gets to the end of the movie and is subjected to a literal cliffhanger shot with what looks like rear-projection from the 1940s, one is sincerely hoping that Schroeder will have a sudden burst of sympathy for the murderers — and us — and do away with Bullock’s irksome cop. Let her drop, I say.