The Oxford Murders was quite disappointing. It really felt like it was directed by someone whose native tongue is not English – the dialogue was horribly stilted, every single performance except John Hurt’s remarkably wooden and the pacing lurched and shuddered about.
There was some weird overdubbing for the Russian guy, meaning his lips weren’t quite matching his voice, and possibly the most unconvincing sex scenes I’ve ever witnessed. And the story wasn’t much good either, reminding me of The Rule of Four, only less clever. For all the talk of Wittgenstein and allusions to Fermat’s Last Theorum, the script totally failed to seem intelligent, the philosophical aspect totally lacking (the Cogito, Laplace’s Demon and the designer universe argument all really ought to have at least been raised in the context of Wittgenstein’s attempts to ascertain what can be known with certainty) and the crime thriller really sloppy, with a huge reliance on coincidence and a final conclusion that seems less like a reflection on chaos theory than a weak writer’s expedience.
Everything felt extremely juvenile, like a GCSE drama production – our avatar gets to show his brain-power, get a LOT of easy (bad) sex and the loose ends get tied up anywhere they’ll fit. This stinker was as bad as The Da Vinci Code.
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