Murder by Numbers Review

Two high school boys who kill for the pleasure of proving they can is a premise that has produced great films, and this one keeps half finding the good version of itself. Ryan Gosling's rich, loose Richard and Michael Pitt's brittle Justin are a genuinely uncomfortable pair, bound by contempt, a shared secret and something neither will name, and Gosling is predatory in a way American movies rarely allow handsome teenagers to be. Everything around them is rented from better thrillers.

Sandra Bullock's detective arrives with a backstory of such lurid convenience, a stabbing, a false name, the nickname Hyena, that the film keeps stopping to explain her, and Ben Chaplin is handed a romance with her that nobody involved appears to want. Barbet Schroeder and his cinematographer Luciano Tovoli do give the Northern California coast a cold, clinical light, and the evidence gathering has a patience the script never matches. Then the last twenty minutes collapse into a cliffside house in a storm with a killer monologuing over a drop, which is precisely the ending a story about the vanity of intellect should refuse.