<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Directed By: Alex de la Iglesia<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Starring: Elijah Wood, John Hurt, Leonor Watling, Julie Cox, Jim Carter, Burn Gorman, Anna Massey<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Who doesn’t love a good riddle? Even if you can’t solve it on the spot, someone gives you the answer and even hearing the logic of it after the fact is immensely entertaining. But what fun is a riddle you can’t understand? None and that’s why The Oxford Murders<\/em> fails. You’re curious, but then get a slew of wildly fantastical twists and turns making you wish you could just give up and find out the answer. But until you can watch this one on DVD, there\u2019s no fast forwarding and you must endure 108 minutes of painful perplexity only to discover an answer that\u2019s preposterous.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Elijah Wood stars as Martin, an American working on his doctorate at Oxford. He goes there with his fingers crossed that his idol, Arthur Seldom (John Hurt), will agree to supervise his thesis, but when the two finally come face-to-face in a packed lecture hall, Seldom berates Martin for attempting to disprove the concept that irrefutable truth don\u2019t exist. The encounter is so disheartening, Martin opts to pack his things and head home to the states. But when he gets back to Mrs. Eagleton’s (Anna Massey) house where he’s renting a room, he finds the poor old lady dead. Curiously enough, Martin isn’t alone when he finds Eagleton’s lifeless body, Seldom is there too. A note drove him to the crime scene, a note that also came with a cryptic symbol and implied more murders would follow.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n The Oxford Murders<\/span><\/em> starts out promising. At first, Martin is a likable protagonist, his predicament is set up nicely and there\u2019s a riveting foreboding feeling in the air, but once the mathematical geniuses collide, it\u2019s just an overdose of unintelligible, wordy jargon that is meaningless to everyone expect Martin and Seldom. The whole scenario makes little sense from the first murder on. Apparently there\u2019s a killer leaving clues behind, but the audience is never let in on Seldom\u2019s decoding game, making the whole situation frustrating rather than intriguing. Martin barely gets what\u2019s going on himself and even when he declares he does, there\u2019s no justification to his revelation. In fact, there\u2019s really no logical validation for anything that happens in this film. Things just fall into place and we\u2019re expected to accept them.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n For instance, there\u2019s Martin\u2019s love interest, Lorna (Leonor Watling). She bumps into him playing racquetball, it sparks a relationship and then it just so happens that she works at the facility where the second murder takes place and has a past with Seldom. And she\u2019s not the only supporting character buried in an outlandish scenario; The Oxford Murders<\/em> has a handful of people who are blatantly thrown in only to be seen as possible killers. First off there\u2019s Beth (Julie Cox), Mrs. Eagleton\u2019s daughter. She\u2019s a strange individual to start, but the character completely goes down when her infatuation for Martin kicks in. Even stranger is Martin\u2019s study partner, Yuri (Burn Gorman), who\u2019s just completely out of his mind. Perhaps these two characters wouldn\u2019t have been so disconcerting had Gorman and Cox not been suffering from an extreme case of overacting.<\/span><\/p>\n
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