Review of The Oxford Murders (2008) by Baju H — 13 May 2009

Yuck!

That's one way of describing the viewing of The Oxford Murders, a film akin to picking your way through a particularly sticky mess. Elijah Wood comes to Oxford to study under the great mathematician John Hurt but is soon embroiled in murderous goings on which seem to point to a mathematic solution. They don't of course, it's all a load of bollocks. Nonsensical scripting combined with too much number related waffle plus a score of characters who exhibit no personality and talk more unconvincingly than the cast of Dawson's Creek make this a celluloid quagmire that is neither engaging or even remotely coherent.

Wood plays a nondescript lead who's decisions make less and less sense, his relationships with the other characters only barely defined. He has no chemistry with an equally useless Hurt and in their scenes together when the other isn't present in shot, they may as well be on different continents. Torchwood's Burn Gorman is thrown away in a pointless role. I think he's meant to be Polish but I wasn't sure.

The film meanders along, Wood seems to think the use of spaghetti would be erotic (it's not) and the conclusion is just as pathetically dull as all that has come before it.

Oxford Murders desperately wants to be a clever, complex thriller but at the end of the day, maths is boring, and so is this movie.