matxil Rarely a film fails on so many levels. The film tries to say "deep things" but clearly neither the writer nor the director have a clue what they are talking about, so all the "profound" stuff is merely ridiculous (low point: Wittgenstein during WWI writing in his notebook, and that's only the introduction to the film). As a Monty Python sketch that might have been funny, but since the film is pretending to say something serious, it's just embarrassing. The acting is abysmal, the plot is silly and full of holes, for some incomprehensible reason there are two girls who suddenly fall in love with the main character, but there's no way to understand why (or how, since there's zero chemistry). For me, the worst part were the dialogues, though. At the beginning, the American student who just finds a boarding room with some woman who used to know a number of famous mathematicians, picks up a photo and then explains who the people on the photo are, why they are famous, and a short Wikipedia biography of their lives. Subtle. "Well," says the woman, "you did your homework". If only the scriptwriters, the director and the actors would have done the same.

Guy Lanoue I really wanted to like this film, thinking it was an old-fashioned, slow placed and thoughtful alternative to the usual special effects cesspool: using brains, mathematics and philosophy to track down a murderer. American graduate student in Oxford (Wood) has sex right off the boat with a beautiful nurse (Watling) and gets to lodge in a wonderfully eccentric and charming old house with a wonderfully eccentric and charming old woman (Anna Massey), meets eccentric and not so charming fellow student, and gets to meet eccentric and burnt out but still bitingly witty and narcissistic genius (Hurt), who is also the ex-lover of the beautiful nurse with the never-explained accent. We get it. Despite being allegedly built around a weird subset of logical-positivistic philosophy (badly and erroneously summed up by Hurt's public lecture at the beginning), in fact the movie is built around clichés. I don't understand how an allegedly mathematician turned writer could have written such a bad script. I mean, you wouldn't expect a mathematician to describe a sexy love scene, and in fact the lack of chemistry between Wood and Watling is amazing and really, really lust-killing, but to get basic knowledge of the world of mathematical logic wrong is really unsettling. Worse, math is dumbed down. The only thing this script could possibly have going for it is its use of math as a narrative device, yet we see Wood marking up a squash court to calculate better angles of attack. This is supposed to sell us on math? Why is Wittgenstein's Tractatus described as a series of mathematical equations? It's not. Why is Fermat's Last theorem anonymised by presenting it as Bormat's Last Theorem? Was the legal office on the production team somehow afraid that Fermat's descendants would put in a claim for royalties 400 years later if they actually used his name? Why is the real mathematician who finally solved the puzzle in the 1990s, Andrew Wiles, presented as looking like a summer-stock theatre director named Wilkes? Wiles' proof is over a hundred pages long, not something that can be scribbled on a board during a public lecture, though Wiles did give a talk in 1993 at Cambridge, not Oxford, announcing his proof, the same year in which the film is set. Are we supposed to get a secret thrill figuring out the roman-a-clef hints that it's really Fermat, as if that wasn't obvious to 100% of the math and science nerds and MENSA members who would watch a film like this? This is just dumb scripting: seductresses (Watling) have to be incredibly sultry, professors have to have Einstein hair and elbow patches, young and hungry students have to be iconoclasts, and so on. In the end, it's not about the bad math and bad scripting but the bad casting. Wood is not really believable as a would-be Beautiful Mind math genius, Hurt is a prissily theatrical stereotype of the Mad Professor, and Watling is way too sophisticated and sexy to be a believable nurse who melts into a mass of walking pheromones when she catches a glimpse of future Hobbit Wood. The backstories are either simple-minded (Hurt, Massey) or simply banal (Wood, Watling). In the end, the so-called math that is supposed to be the key to unlocking the murder mystery is way less engaging than the word games in The Da Vinci Code. In the end, we have a movie about math and serial killers in which there (SPOILER) no serial killers and no real math.

gemma_hass I have always been a fan of murder mysteries and after seeing the DVD in my video store, I thought the Oxford murders sounded pretty interesting with a slight dan brown edge to it. Having Elijah wood and john hurt in the two lead roles also prompted my interest too. After having watched it, I must say that I wasn't entirely taken with it. The acting was on par and I could sit and listen to john hurts voice all day but the story line was not badly executed but more like sluggishly executed. The script could have done with more tightening up, and a few scenes could have been deleted (such as the awful love scenes between Elijah wood and the actress who plays his love interest) The story has a great premise but that is far as my praise extends. I'm not saying I hate it but its not a film I would willingly go see again.

aethomson For the typical products of today's college degree courses, i.e. viewers with a smattering of philosophy or mathematical theory, this would-be intellectual romp might look like durned clever stuff. For viewers with two smatterings, it's more a case of irritating pretension. However, director and scriptwriter Alex de la Iglesia has quite a lot of fun with the arcane foibles of ivory tower academia, such as the rivalry between England's Ivy League universities, Oxford and Cambridge. There's even a gratuitous parody (contributes little if anything to the plot) of the momentous occasion (June 23, 1993) when Andrew Wiles announced at Cambridge the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem that he had developed while at Princeton (Refer IMDb's "Did You Know?" above). Yeah, that's the flavour of the piece.Is anyone unfamiliar with the final proposition (#7) in Wittgenstein's "Tractatus"? Here is the Pears/McGuinness translation (and more people ought to read this sentence and heed it): "What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence." Now you know. A self-parodying John Hurt has been invited to overact the role of Arthur Seldom, an Oxford don promoting his latest book - we certainly needed another weighty tome about Wittgenstein. Martin (Elijah Wood) is a brainy nerd (girls fall for him but) who's come all the way from Arizona in the hope that Prof Seldom will condescend to supervise his PhD studies. However it doesn't look as if his degree is going to get any further than some verbal point-scoring and blackboards getting filled with incomprehensible equations. Jim Carter grumbles away, endeavouring to fill the shoes of the late John Thaw, but a charismatic Inspector Morse he ain't.Aw forget it. Enjoy the story. It's not bad. Some decent lines of dialogue are provided for some competent actors (we don't get to see enough of the splendid Anna Massey - you can guess why). There are nifty insights about the unintended consequences of our trivial actions, or for that matter our best-laid plans. You might even decide at the end that the whole thing made quite a lot of sense. There are ingenious twists, that get ingeniously untwisted and then ingeniously retwisted. What's not to like? (You may want to watch it a second time, to spot the tricks.) BTW, that fluttering butterfly deep in the Amazon jungle triggering a hurricane way out in the Atlantic is an urban myth. If this movie "The Oxford Murders" inspires you to get into chaos theory, James Gleick wrote a book about it; and the Gribbin family business (popularisation of science) has a title, "Deep Simplicity" - a lot easier to read than Wittgenstein.