The Oxford Murders (2008)

I didn't know much about The Oxford Murders prior watching it, but I was expecting it to be good because of its cast, John Hurt actually (Elijah Wood is the reason I wanted to see this though). Guess who was disappointed? I was. 

Martin (Elijah Wood) is an Amerstudenttuden in mathematics who enrolled at Oxford in the hope of meeting his mentor, Professor Seldon (John Hurt). And his dream comes true when Mrs. Eagleton (Anna Massey), the old lady who rented him a room, is killed and he starts investigating the murder with Seldon, who happened to be a friend of Mrs. Eagleton. 

The story sounds pretty intriguing, one of the problems is that a lot of math is involved in it and if you don't understand what Martin and Seldon are talking about most of the time, you are very likely to get bored to death. 

Another problem is the nonsense going on in this film. There's a woman, Mrs. Eagleton's daughter (played by Julie Cox), who falls in love with Martin after like 5 seconds. There's a police inspector investigating the murders sharing confidential information about the investigation with the murder suspects. I mean, come on!

Another problem, and I promise is the last one, are the twists. If you take away all the nonsense, the plot is quite intricate and interesting, but towards the end, there are just too many twists for it to work.

Oden Sky Filmworks, Magnolia Pictures

The writing mess doesn't only concern the plot but the characters as well. There's no development. The English characters are nothing more than a bunch of stereotypes and let's not even dwell too much on that weird/pathetic/batshit crazy probably Russian student played by Burn Gorman, one of the many characters that serve no purpose in the story. 

And pretty much everything else is bad. Álex de la Iglesia's direction is terrible. There's no pace and the music adds nothing to the film. If anything, it takes away from it, if that's even possible. The acting is also pretty bad, especially from Elijah Wood. John Hurt is mediocre, to say the least, but at least he tried. Only it was impossible to save a film with such a script.