Search - Murder by Numbers (Full-Screen Edition) (Snap Case) on DVD

Jessica A. from IBERIA, OH
Reviewed on 11/4/2008...

Very good suspense thriller!

A solid movie with an amazing Sandra Bullock

Frank Neumann | Germany | 07/21/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"In the past Sandra Bullock never had a role with a deep psychological background like Jodie Forster or Meryl Streep. Now she has this kind of role.
The film is about Cassie Mayweather, a female cop, who chases after two young boys (brilliant: Pitt and Gosling) to find the truth about the murder of a young woman.
The characters of the boys are well written but the character of Cassie is not. I had no business caring about her. But I did because of Bullock. How does she do that? She's very low key. She's so natural she seemes to be remembering a scene rather than playing it. She never overacts. She creates a sensation that although a scene may seem absurd to us, it seemes perfectly real to her. And we buy it. The movie is effective in slow and silent way but still I liked it.
And finally Bullock proved that she is a serious actress and if she ever get a great screenplay we may need seat belts"

Saved by two outstanding performances

Roland E. Zwick | Valencia, Ca USA | 04/21/2002

(3 out of 5 stars)

""Murder By Numbers" is merely the latest version of the old Leopold and Loeb story, wherein two amoral youths plan and execute a cold-blooded murder for the sheer intellectual challenge of seeing if they can get away with it. Alfred Hitchcock had a go at the tale back in the 1940's in a film called "Rope," and now it appears to be Barbet Schroeder's turn this time around. Aided by writer Tony Gayton, Schroeder focuses on Richard and Justin, two high school buddies living in a bucolic seaside community in Northern California, who commit murder in order to prove Justin's thesis that the courage to carry through with a crime is the ultimate form of human freedom. Anyone who has read "Crime and Punishment" will know immediately that this is not a particularly original philosophical position and, in fact, the film even makes some heavy-handed allusions to that famous novel in the fact that one of the characters in the movie keeps referring to Justin, the mastermind of the plot, as "Napoleon" (Napoleon serves as the inspiration for the novel's main character, Raskolnikov). Richard is the pretty little rich boy, popular in school for both his good looks and his attitude of cool detachment, while Justin is the nerdy intellectual, dismissed by most of his peers as creepily eccentric, who has made an exhaustive study of just how to "get away with murder" by circumventing all the forensic techniques used in modern crime scene investigation. "Murder By Numbers" is definitely at its best when it is focusing on the two youths and the strange relationship between them - and clearly at its worst when it is viewing matters from the opposite perspective, that of the criminal investigating team led by Cassie Mayweather, played by Sandra Bullock. Cassis seems to come equipped with all the standard baggage common to lead female characters who happen to be working in a predominantly ugly (i.e. male-dominated) profession. The brusque demeanor with which she confronts most of her colleagues has earned her the affectionate nicknames "Hyena" and "Scorpion" (the former because hyenas apparently have a pseudo-penis and the latter for more obviously symbolic reasons). Not only is this beautiful young woman (as always) unattached (why are such attractive people in movies never in relationships?), but she drives men away by her refusal to let any of them get truly near to her. The filmmakers have tried to apply some psychological depth to her character by having her suffering from the effects of a traumatic event in her past, but this whole aspect seems strangely unconvincing and tacked on - and rather distracting when what we really want to be doing is following the much more interesting drama taking place between the two boys.Although Bullock is never less than competent in the lead role, the scene-stealers turn out to be Ryan Gosling as Richard and, most especially, Michael Pitt as Justin. These two fine actors command our attention every time they appear on the screen and lift this rather routine script to the level of high drama more frequently than it surely deserves. Pitt, in particular, beautifully underplays the role of the social outcast, a boy so intellectually brilliant that he cannot connect with the flesh-and-blood people around him. Yet, the single finest aspect of the screenplay is that it does not portray Pitt as a hopelessly twisted maniac. He is, in fact, capable of both compassion and fear - a fact which helps to make his character compelling and complex enough to pique our interest. "Murder By Numbers" is, in a way, an appropriately named movie. But thanks to sharp performances by Gosling and Pitt, the film has more to offer than it otherwise might."