Movie Review: Murder By Numbers

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Cassie Mayweather: Sandra Bullock
Richard Haywood: Ryan Gosling
Justin Pendleton: Michael Pitt
Sam Kennedy: Ben Chaplin
Lisa: Agnes Penn
Warner Bros. presents a film directed by Barber Schroeder. Written by Tony Gayton. Running time: 119 minutes. Rated R (for violence, language, and sex scene and brief drug use).

Richard and Justin, the high school killers in "Murder by Numbers," may not have heard of leopold and Loeb, or seen Hitchcock's "Rope," or studied and of the other fictional versions of the infamous murder pact between two brainy and amoral young men. But they're channeling it. "Murder by Numbers" crosses Leopold/Loeb with a police procedural and adds an interesting touch: Insteas of toying with the audience, it toys with the charactrers. We have information they desperately desire, and we watch them dueling in misdirection.

The movie stars Sandra Bullock as Vassie Mayweather, a veteran detective, experienced enough to trust her hunches and resist the obvious answers, Ben Chaplin is Sam Kennedy, her by-the-book Partner, the kind of cop who gets an A for every step of his investigation but ends up with the wrong Conclusion. Paired against them are Richard Haywood and Justin Pendleton. These are two brainy high school kids, fascinated as Leopold and Loeb were by the possibility of proving their superiority by committing the perfect murder.

Their plan: Pick a victim completely at random, so that there is no link between corpse and killers and leave behind no clues. The film opens with the suggestion of a suicide pact between the two teenagers, who face each other, holding revolvers to their heads, in a crumbling gothic building so improbably close to the edge of a seaside cliff that we intuit someone is going to be dangling over by the end of the film.

Bolluck's Cassie is the central character, a good cop but a damaged human being, whose past holds some kind of fearsome grip on her present....