Review: ‘Murder’ proves deadly for Bullock

Geoff Carter

Friday, April 19, 2002 | 9:39 a.m.

'Murder by Numbers'

Grade: **

Starring: Sandra Bullock, Ben Chaplin, Michael Pitt and Ryan Gosling.

Screenplay: Tony Gayton.

Director: Barbet Schroeder.

Rated: R for violence, language, a brief sex scene and drug use.

Running time: 119 minutes.

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Iwant to like Sandra Bullock; I really do. But she keeps making mediocre films, one after the other: "Gun Shy." "Speed 2: Cruise Control." "28 Days." She's got note-perfect delivery and good comic timing, but from the outset of Barbet Schroeder's deadly dull "Murder by Numbers," it's readily evident she's going to squander those gifts, once again. It's a thriller only in name, a hoary bunch of cliches in a suspense-free vacuum. By the numbers, indeed.

Bullock plays crime scene investigator Cassie Mayweather, a brilliant but disliked cop who's earned the nickname "The Hyaena." (A couple of characters are given pointless nicknames that Tony Gayton's script goes out of its way to explain.) As Pat Benatar once put it, she's a real tough cookie with a long history, the details of which are revealed over the course of the film.

I'll say this: Just one time, I'd like to see a movie in which a woman becomes a cop because she likes the work, and not because of some long-ago trauma. Someday we won't be subjected to the "And that's why I became a cop" speech, but not this time. Even Bullock looks bored as she delivers it.

Mayweather and her new partner, Sam Kennedy (Ben Chaplin), are assigned to investigate a woman's murder, not knowing that it's been so thoroughly engineered that they're heading down one blind alley after another. The perpetrators, high school brats Justin Pendleton (Michael Pitt) and Richard Haywood (Ryan Gosling), have made some sort of pact, sealed over penny-ante philosophy and glasses of absinthe, and they know more about forensics than most cops.

The film follows both the stories of both parties, and Schroeder does manage to stir some interest in the dialogue scenes. Bullock is a frisky nihilist; she seduces Chaplin's character and tells him, "Don't worry, I won't get possessive."

Meanwhile Gosling's Richard does get possessive of Pitt's brainy visigoth, to the point of seducing Justin's girlfriend just so he can have him to himself. Gosling, a former member of "The Mickey Mouse Club" (the Britney/Christina cast), gives the best performance in the film -- brave and energetic.

After almost 40 minutes have gone by, and the characters have told us more than we needed to know about them, Schroeder begins pouring on the suspense, but it's not enough to cover Gayton's rambling character study. Ultimately you just don't care who did what, and you want somebody, anybody to do anything at all. There are so many moral speeches in this film that it could run for office.

Bullock deserves better than this. (So does Chaplin, but it's not his film, not by a long shot.) She needs a movie that doesn't flatten her speech, quash her femininity and rob her of her wit. Maybe she's done this to herself, or maybe she's just had an extraordinary run of bad luck. Either way, she doesn't look like she's enjoying herself in "Murder by Numbers," and aren't games meant to be enjoyed?