Movies By Numbers
...Sort Of

by Ed Owens

Looking at the upcoming slate of summer releases, I was astounded at the number of sequels and remakes opening at the local multiplex during the height of the movie-going season. It would seem that the Hollywood well has run dry...or mostly dry...given that even new movies are relying on tried and true formulas rather than risking exploring new territory. Two recent release actually have a little of both, following well-trodden paths while attempting something a little different.

Murder By Numbers is the latest in Sandra Bullock's on-again, off-again career. Aside from starring in the film, she also executive produced, and therein may be the film's fatal flaw. The movie is essentially two stories. One follows the exploits of two intelligent yet bored high schoolers, steeped in Nietzschean philosophy, who plot and execute what they consider the perfect crime. The story echoes the Leopold and Loeb case that has inspired several other films (Rope, Compulsion, and the more recent Swoon among them, all better films). The details of both the planning and the crime itself are engaging, and the young actors (Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt) acquit themselves admirably. Gosling is particularly impressive, exuding a wicked charm that is simultaneously disarming and creepy.

The second story follows the cops assigned to investigate the crime: Cassie (played by Bullock) and her new partner, Sam (Ben Chaplin). Cassie, of course, carries the sort of emotional baggage that's been rote in this sort of film for decades now, and Sam finds himself in the middle of two cases - figuring out both whodunit and why Cassie is such an aloof and difficult partner (both professionally and personally, as their romantic involvement is pretty much assumed from the outset).

Everything about Cassie's storyline is painted with the broadest of strokes, from director Barbet Schroeder's heavy-handed treatment of Cassie's dark secret to the script's Film Writing 101 approach to character development. Even Bullock seems strained, stretching to escape the girl-next-door image that has become her trademark. Any interest generated by the boys' story rapidly becomes lost in the mire of contrivances that is Cassie's. Eventually, both stories converge in an action-packed finale straight out of the Hollywood playbook (not to mention patently absurd in so many ways that it boggles the mind).

Ultimately, Murder By Numbers lives up to his name, a by-the-numbers crime thriller made all the more disappointing by the remnants of the good film that might have been.

The latest installment in the seemingly endless series of Friday the 13th films, Jason X is one story with two approaches, one the classic slasher horror of the earlier films and the other straight-up self-parody. As with any of the other films in the series, the story is little more than a line on which to hang the film's carnage: Jason gets cryogenically frozen (after handily dispatching a group of guards without even breaking a sweat) and subsequently thawed hundreds of years later aboard a research ship full of horny med students (oh yeah...and a squad of marines for fodder).

People get naked and people die, not necessarily in that order.

What keeps Jason X from ever really hitting its stride is the film's
inconsistent tone. Yet another victim of the post-modern horror epidemic, the picture wants to have it both ways, successfully working the conventions of the genre while allowing for self-parody. The film, however, never finds the middle ground. The first hour is largely straight horror (barring the occasional one-liners that seem to come with the territory), while the last half-hour plus is self-parody bordering on spoof.

Oddly enough, the film has successful moments. Some of the early carnage is inventive, if you're into that sort of thing, and a holo-deck sequence involving Camp Crystal Lake circa 1980 is nothing short of inspired. Too bad nothing else in the film is. Most of Jason X, directed by visual effects veteran James Isaac, doggedly follows the outline established by its predecessors. Again, the end result is a film that disappoints precisely because it gives us a taste of what could have been, then expects us to be satisfied with less.

©2002 Ed Owens
CineScene