Genre bender

>> Murder by Numbers isn’t by the numbers

by MARK SLUTSKY

Director Barbet Schroeder has had one of those weird, totally unclassifiable careers, making movies of all types in all sorts of countries. The guy’s produced most of Eric Rohmer’s movies, acted in Mars Attacks! and Beverly Hills Cop III, and directed movies as disparate as Single White Female and last year’s great, brutal Our Lady of the Assassins. Murder by Numbers sees Schroeder returning to the thriller genre he’s worked in many times before.

In the hands of a less interesting director, Murder by Numbers could have been a forgettable Sandra Bullock vehicle. The script isn’t exactly terrible, but it does sport a number of clichés more suited to worse movies, like a cop who lives on a houseboat. Bullock is the cop in question, in a role a little darker than the bubbly types she so often plays. Detective Cassie Mayweather, as she’s known, is a tough-as-nails cop with a tragic past—yes, I know, it sounds bad, but trust me, it comes off better in the movie. And while it may seem weird to hear Bullock delivering lines like “Get out of my crime scene!” she does kind of win you over by the end.

The plot has Bullock on the trail of a couple of Leopold and Loeb-style killers, two smart teenage boys (Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt) who attempt to prove their intellectual superiority by carrying out a murder and getting away with it. Schroeder’s definitely going for a bit of a Hitchcock thing here, with villains right out of Rope (Bullock’s troubled past also adds a little Vertigo action).

The cat-and-mouse between Bullock and the two boys (both very well played by Gosling and Pitt) is definitely entertaining, though it would be improved by a few more thrills. As such, the movie’s caught between the mystery and thriller genres, and sometimes feels like it hasn’t really made up its mind. So while it’s not as good an Hitchcock homage as, say, the recent What Lies Beneath, Murder by Numbers is unquestionably an above-average, very visually striking thriller. :

Murder by Numbers opens Friday, April 19