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55 out of 82 people found the following review useful: A worth seeing mystery movie, 19 January 2008 Author: efewebber from www.efeweb.es
Fresh out of the cinema I have a very good feeling about the movie. My first impression is that it is definitely worth seeing. Alex de la Iglesia (the director of for instance "El Dia de la Bestia" or "La comunidad") makes this time a mystery movie following the classical parameters. A nice plot, specially for those who like mathematics or logic in general, with intricate moves and very nice dialogs by John Hurt and Eliah Wood (who, by the way, looks like a pretty solid actor. I had only seen him playing Frodo and was a bit worried about him getting stuck on that character, not at all) who basically follow the classical thoughts about "the perfect murder" and in the philosophical search for absolute truths.Being a fan of de la Iglesia, whose sense of humor is well known and pretty easy to recognize, I am quite happy to see that he is also able of making a genuine mystery film, with everything you expect to see on it, twisted arguments, funny characters ("Podorov", and of course, Dominique Pinon from, among others, Delicatessen) and a extremely good film-making, nice sequences, good mystery music, etc.To me, being a bit of a geek, the mathematical references are too obvious, the series shown are too well known, they are nice nonetheless, but for instance why to talk about Fibonaci numbers (which were also in the 'Da Vinci Code' when one can talk about many other nice and funny series? On the other hand being a mystery movie's lover one always enjoys the sequences which are clear homage's to previous classics, pay attention and you'll enjoy.Let me end up by mentioning the very nice work of Leonor Watling (you may have seen her before in, for example Almodovar's "Talk to her", her meaning she), who, apart from being a really good actress, of being extremely beautiful and attractive is also a pretty good singer! It was quite a pleasure, being Spanish myself, to see her playing an important role with such a great casting! So, watch it by yourself, the first "serious" Alex de la Iglesia movie, and he does a pretty good job!
44 out of 70 people found the following review useful: Good movie, wouldn't read the bad comments., 20 July 2008 Author: jordan_008 from Canada
Most of the comments are from those who just didn't understand. Then of course try to make themselves seem smart just because they watched it. I recommend it. Not too many movies out like this, with lots of twists in a style I can't say I've yet viewed. As far as the comment goes on how everything is old, perhaps they've never seen a movie that was made to be in older style. Clearly doesn't watch a lot of movies, nor should be posting on a site like this. They were probably baffled and tried figuring out which country had the flying cars and 2D world after seeing the Jetson's cartoon. Anyway, enough ranting about people who can't grasp the depth. The acting wasn't bad at all I found. Of course Elijah acts different, which I see not everybody likes, but you need to respect the fact he's an actor. We all got to know him as "the guy from Lord of the Rings". Well, newsflash, in his defense he won't be acting the same way in this "smart" movie as he did fighting off monsters with a smaller vocabulary. He plays an intelligent role this time around. I can't say I know of 'anybody' who could figure out what happens in the end. It 'is' indeed a very deep plot, they twist your mind so much into understanding what's presently going on, you don't have a lot of time to think of what's going to happen. Well I'm tired, bedtime. If what I said doesn't all make complete sense, that is why. Goodnight, and I hope you enjoy the film :-)
20 out of 30 people found the following review useful: Oxford Murders lacks intelligence, 3 September 2008 Author: Terry Arif from United Kingdom
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
I was optimistic that The Oxford Murders would be a clever and interesting story. Unfortunately it was as far from this as possible.I have never written a film review before and was so deeply unimpressed by this film that I was compelled to share my views. I find it very upsetting to think that the amount of money that was spent on this film could be wasted in such a manner.The film struggles on every level. Bad acting, coupled with a poorly written script and ill thought out plot plague this film from the offset. It simply fails to capture the imagination.The film is based in the English town of Oxford, famed worldwide for it's university and intellectual breeding. The plot centers around the relationship between a American exchange student, martin, and a lecturer at the university. The pair, somewhat oddly, become entailed in a series of pointless and quite pathetic 'murders'.A theasaurus happy writer has quite obviously engineered this film for Hollywood and it is largely for this reason that the film is so bad. The film tries to link complex mathematics and murder, apparently the murderer is leaving some kind of mathematical sequence at each murder. This is a common theme throughout the film, however it is quite sad that the writers think the viewers of this film will mistake basic secondary level concepts for nobel prize winning intellect.Painful examples of this lurk round every corner, like in one scene Martin and his Tutor are in the police station, they are talking about the murders and a symbol left at the first crime scene. Martin explains the fibonacci series word for word and is giving a impressed look from his tutor who is apparently a famous theoretical mathematician. Most children in England learn the Fibonacci series before they are 16.It appears as if no research has been carried out either. English characters are displayed whith such stereotypical generalism and it appears as if all extras that are in the film are in fact deformed in some way. Oxford is a village, and it is quite apparent that this version of Oxford looks like a cross between medieval england and the last of the summer wine (english country drama).From the thick police inspector and his daft side kick to crazy Russian (I say Russian, but you would have no clue what nationality he actually is based on the appalling acting of this character) mathematician. In fact the majority of characters in this film are completely irrelevant and actually serve nothing towards the plot.Being obviously aimed at Hollywood with every single basic academic principle being completely explained for the obvious benefit of the 'stupid' public, they obviously needed female relationships to complete this film. The sex scene is especially haunting, Elijah Woods pale and childlike figure is something which I would not wish on any man or women.The acting is of the lowest standard bar the performance of John Hurt, who is makes the best of an awful script and plot. The extras and cameo characters are so bad and Elijah Wood can only act in films which are special effect and fantasy based as they take the emphasis off of the actual acting.These issues are really only sub issues in comparison to the main problem. The plot.It really is sad to watch the plot embroil, from the detective inspectors who seem to share case files, car lifts and murder evidence with apparent murder suspects or perhaps maybe the strange cello playing daughter who falls it is later explained fell in love with Martin after meeting him once briefly for ten minutes and sharing a conversation. It could be the beautiful foreign student who is Martins main love interest, who it is explained used to be in a relationship with a 70 year old looking lecturer before hand, although she cannot be over 20 in the film. Or perhaps it is the murder sequence which developed which apparently took 2 police officers, a super intelligent student and world famous lecturer a age and a day to solve, which was eventually one of the most basic and simple series i think i have ever seen.In one impossible scene a man dies whilst playing a musical instrument and falls off of the stage in front of a packed crowd, in which police were sat. It is later explained with the cheesiest cut scene i have ever seen that after this guy fell of the stage and died, someone sneaked onto the stage in full view of everyone and apparently snuck a clue into the music book on the bandstand! Even though it is explained that at that the time the character in question is being followed and watched by police and the police officer who is watching the suspect is even shown as the camera moves over to him! I think I have had my rant and am finding it to painful to continue conveying the endless flaws which stalk this film so I will stop now. To be honest I am not really discouraging anyone to watch this, i am more upset with the quality of films which talent writers drill out in the quickest possible time because they think they are above everyone else. Please do not waste money on rubbish films like these, it is very depressing.
28 out of 48 people found the following review useful: Witty, refreshing and challenging., 22 May 2008 Author: opeixe from Spain
The Oxford Murders from Alex de La Iglesia is a refreshing appearance on international releases. The opening's most stunning speech from brilliant John Hurt "There's no truth outside of mathematics... Philosophy is dead." begins a journey with an impeccable filmography. The uninterrupted shot following the main characters on the streets of Oxford, into the bookstore, and onto the streets again to end in the crime scene was perfect, and shows off the director's film-making skills. Elijah and Leonor are both rare specimens in today's one pattern acting and appearance, also I found there was no chemistry between them, they both did a great job only shadowed by John Hurt's impressive performance. This is really a film not to miss.
17 out of 29 people found the following review useful: Excellent adaption of the short story, 25 April 2008 Author: duncan-lip from United Kingdom
For those who haven't read the Oxford Murders, it is a short story about an Argentinean maths student who comes to Oxford only to find that someone has murdered his landlady. The short story delves into mathematical theory in an attempt to solve a series of murders where the murderer leaves symbols, also in a potential series. Being a short story is does lack in depth and this is where this movie has taken this story and expanded on it. For those who are concerned that maths is not their thing, don't worry. The concepts are very well explained. It would be typical that these complex ideas are overly simplified and patronise the audience, but this is not case.A very good short story adapted into an excellent steady paced movie.
7 out of 10 people found the following review useful: Curate's Egg, 2 September 2008 Author: markbc-2 from United Kingdom
I was looking forward to this film and didn't get the chance to see it at the cinema. Its been released on DVD this week so I popped down to HMV yesterday and bought it and....I'm still trying to sum it up for myself.It wasn't a bad film, not like everyone seems to be making out, but it wasn't a great film either. It was just good-ish.I liked the idea of how things that are totally random can set of a whole host of things and how sometimes people look to hard for reason and logic when there is none to be had. All these themes were present in an otherwise old fashioned and enjoyable thriller and cat and mouse plot. The interplay between the Hurt and Wood characters reminded me occasionally of Slueth and on the whole I could imagine this film doing much better if it was made in the 1970s. It also reminded me of some kind of TV pilot of two complete opposites getting together to solve a murder case, the ageing professor and his plucky young Rhode scholar! Straight out of some Anglo-American 80s programme! It had that kind of old style vibe to it that was hard to dislike. Contrary to what some scathing reviews say.It was obvious though that it comes from a foreign novel and that it was a co-production with Spain for the simple reason that we are shown a fairytale style England...again maybe that is why in places it feels old fashioned, the depiction was not out of place from older films which the makers probably grew up with and formed their idea of the UK. I liked and disliked the fact that all the background artistes and supports seemed to be made up of grotesques; many extras were not the most attractive of people, plus the makers fascination with the sick and the ill, which naturally form a big part of the plot...Alex Cox's cameo as the mad professor was especially gruesomely ugly! The macabre side to me liked the grotesque characters, the Englishman in me disliked the idea that other countries may view us all as ugly and oddball!John Hurt was as ever solidly reliable and seemed to be really enjoying himself. Elijah Wood seems to be getting a lot of flak but I genuinely didn't mind him in this at all. The criticism that he was annoying or whiney falls down for me as the character was meant to be a little like that.Burn Gorman overacted a little, but what else can you do with so obvious a red herring?All in all as I say a good film but it failed to live up to the great looking trailer, as is so often the case. Essentially take away the Da Vinci Code macguffin and we have a straightforward old style murder mystery that many would sit down on a Sunday night to watch on TV, yet for some reason many complain about it because it's a 'film' My advice, take it for what it is and enjoy it.
7 out of 11 people found the following review useful: Useful as a example of bad screen writing for future screenwriters, 9 April 2009 Author: rzajac from Dongshih, Taiwan
This film would appear to be a case where a well-intentioned producer, or enclave of producers, noticed a public interest in conceptually high-toned and seemingly erudite subject matter, combined with more staid pop story elements, like serial murder (Se7en) or overcoming emotional/psychological issues (Good Will Hunting/A Beautiful Mind).The problem appears to be that they turned the screen writing job over to hacks.I know that's a brutal thing to say, but it really does appear to be the case.The film tries to wed serial murder and academic philosophical musing, but fails. Actually, it tries to bring quite the plethora of de rigueur elements together, and mismanages the whole affair. You have all kinds of messy stuff, and an absence of any really compelling myth to bind it together, or even to effectively humanize the characters. You have John Hurt striving valiantly to imbue each scene he works with warmth and sensitivity, but he fails against the tide of bad overall conception/development. Suddenly, Wood is dallying with his hostess' daughter. Where did that come from? Then, she's mad at him for arriving home late. Was she expecting him? Later, she apologizes, and they seem to have arrived at some kind of cozy platonic status quo. Why? And she plays the cello. Uh, are we supposed to assume that an interest in contemporary orchestral ensemble work functions as a hedge against emotional irrelevancy? This was all fast, senseless, and just one example of many, many instances where presumably emotionally resonant moments float in a mutually disconnected vacuum.And speaking of resonant moments, it's possible that some directorial stringency might have redeemed the script somewhat, though I'm not sure. It appears to be a case where the director accepted the script as-is, directed individual scenes as best as possible, then handed the footage over to editing; maybe they could make sense where he couldn't. There really seemed to be only the faintest glimmer of an understanding of any kind of move toward a redemptive overall storyline. I guess I'm saying that the narrative buck needed to have stopped with the narrators, but instead got passed, ineffectually, along the line in the process, until we see the buck being passed right out our screens and into our laps: The narrators didn't know what they were after--or didn't have the craft to pull it off--could the director handle it? The director couldn't handle it; could the editors make up for the oversight? The editors tried as best they could; if they can't make gold out of shite footage, could the viewer kindly oblige and dig something meaningful out of this morass of disconnected emoting interlaced with disconnected pedantry? By now, I think you get the idea. Seriously: If you're an aspiring screenwriter, WATCH THIS MOVIE. I daresay it's a textbook case.I'm just having one more thought. It is *just possible* that the script is OK, but we're actually witnessing a combination of bad direction and editing mangling it. I would guess it's unlikely, but it *is* possible.
5 out of 8 people found the following review useful: Distracting but nothing special., 23 January 2009 Author: kewos from Spain
I recently moved to Oxford and being Spanish well, I was curious to watch this film. First of all I will say Alex de la Iglesia is not among my top-5 favourite Spanish filmmakers. Probably is not even among the first 10 but anyway the title, the plot and the location intrigued me enough to give it a try.There are some thrillers which the plot is flat and the final twist is good. There're others (most of them) in which 3/4 of the movie is OK but the end is either predictable or incredible or flat. And there others in which everything is flat. That's the case of this film. Is an old fashion movie, nothing new, nothing spectacular, no great acting, final twist is a bit predictable and in average with the rest of the movie.I don't think any of the actors were convinced about the script cause their acting is so sober and flat. Maybe with the exception of Leonor Watling.Among the good points of the movie... well, Oxford is a nice city. The Oxford Crimes is not pretentious at all so even when is not incredible is distracting, good for a weekday at home or watch it after lunch. 5/10
9 out of 16 people found the following review useful: Clue 2: The Post-Grad Version., 1 November 2008 Author: Michael DeZubiria (miked32@hotmail.com) from Luoyang, China
The Oxford Murders is one of a very rare type of movie, I'm not even sure what you would call it. Intellectual Thriller, or maybe Nerd Mystery. Whatever the category, it's one of those thrillers where the leads are so intelligent and inquisitive that they often fly into uncontrollable excitement because of some new bit of mathematical code that just popped into their minds. It starts out with a great hook – a professor is telling a story to his class about a man who, in the midst of a heated battle, sat down amidst all of the gunfire around him and wrote feverishly in his notebook, because he absolutely had to write down what was in his mind at that very moment. What was so important that he would risk his life?Much of the first part of the movie is a philosophical discourse which asks us generic existential clichés like Can we know the truth? And how do we really know anything? Elijah Wood stars as Martin, a young American so eager to achieve the answers to these questions that he travels to England with the sole purpose of picking the brain of a Professor Seldom (whose name sounds like it belongs in a Harry Potter story), the man who was giving the lecture at the beginning of the movie.You see, Martin believes that if we uncover the secret meaning of numbers, we'll know the secret meaning of reality. I'm going to just come right out and say that the movie pretty much lost me at this point. I'm not sure how the meaning of numbers is connected to the meaning of reality, or if the meaning of reality means the meaning of life or just the true nature of our surroundings, and most importantly, I didn't know there was a secret meaning of numbers. In fact, until I saw this movie, I thought that mathematics was a universal language. Maybe I didn't pay enough attention in my college philosophy classes.Regardless, questions like these soon become of the utmost importance, as a series of murders begin happening that seem to be driven by an intellectual motive. At this point you'll notice that every character's behavior and background is designed to make them a suspect, and the movie literally turns into a game of Clue. During their investigations, Seldom and Martin actually discuss the similarities to Clue and how best to solve the mystery using that format. To muddle things even further, the movie uses philosophy to stretch reasonable doubt to the absolute extreme. Seldom explains to Martin in dramatically hushed language that no matter how certain and clear and obvious the evidence, we can never be ABSOLUTELY certain who the killer is. This is the kind of nihilism that leads to the logical conclusion that we should just open all of the prisons and let everyone run free, and maybe even dismantle the entire legal system because, following that logic, it clearly serves no purpose. But one thing I did love about the movie is how Martin shows up from America, this gigantic math geek if ever there was one, and immediately makes friends with two beautiful girls who immediately fall in love with him. I hate it when that happens! One of them, who he met while playing racquetball, is so stunningly beautiful that it makes no sense when she falls for this guy. She makes Elijah Wood look like a little kid! I think there's a good sex scene in the movie where you can see her naked, but I missed almost the entire thing because I fainted when she took her shirt off.There is a complicated and unnecessary back story late in the film about a past student of Seldom's who drove himself insane with his strenuous efforts to answer some of the some of the questions of the universe until he ended up helpless on a hospital bed because his body couldn't keep up with his mind. He loses his legs and his mobility and his sanity and then can't even do better than a hospital that has so little respect for its patients that they would leave a legless man lying naked on his stomach for all to see. Nice.But in the movie's defense, despite all of the mumbo jumbo throughout the film, the climax is actually pretty good. You may feel completely lost for a good part of the running time unless you have a little background in mathematics and philosophy yourself (I don't). But unfortunately, they still can't resist handing us a nicely packaged philosophical sound bite to wrap everything up at the end, which creates a little problem. The mystery in the movie has been allowed to solve itself, and to do so in a pretty impressive way, but then they give us an entirely different solution through dialogue – a crazy solution.I'm willing to bet that this story looked great on paper, but on the screen there is a little too much nonsense to deal with and FAR too much high-brow intellectualism. It's safe to assume that a large portion of the audience will feel pretty alienated. I personally have a tough time relating to characters that get uncontrollably excited about things like historical philosophy and math theory, and an entire movie based on things like this is even more of a challenge.On the other hand, in a time when our movies are overflowing with stupidity, we should cherish the ones that really try to give us something to think about. But personally I prefer the ones that are just a little more accessible…
1 out of 1 people found the following review useful: So boring I fell asleep, 8 July 2009 Author: patoleary-1 from Ireland
Dreadful waste of time. Plot was all over the place. The Argentinian played by Elijah Wood turned into an American for no particular reason. The editing was weird - looks like they rebuilt the story from whatever bits they had to hand in the editing phase. You will keep wondering "uh - where did THAT come from?" There were 2 unbelievable "romantic" interests - no matter how much you may like the wide-eyed and pale Woods. The acting was mostly wooden. Long "explanations" of faux-mathematical theorems and constructs were dropped in here and there in an attempt to move the plot along. The police were portrayed as thick but for some unexplained reason happy to share key information about the crimes with the key suspects. This has to be an embarrassment to John Hurt and any other "real" actor in it.
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