Murder by Numbers

[JunkerSeed]

Was sort of dragged to this yesterday.  Not a bad movie, but not a really good one either.  It's one of those movies that's worth seeing if there's nothing else showing at that theater that you want to see, and you dont feel like renting something.  Basically a decent way to spend two hours, but not much more.  Story goes that a couple of students at school find that life is too boring, nothing that they do ever matters, to their parents, teachers, anyone.  So, they decide to see if they can commit the perfect murder.  Random person, all evidence pointing at someone else.  Sandra Bullock is a tough cop with a new partner trying to solve the case and all that.  And... yeah, you can kind of tell how it all plays out.  I have no problem with genre movies.  Plenty of movies use tired plots, but they're done well, and show what's so great about the genre (Heist and the Score come to mind), this is is just kind of cookie cutter though.  The kids were somewhat interesting since they had somewhat wanky philosophical reasons for wanting to kill, so that was different.  I really got sick of hearing about sandra bullock's character though.  Alchoholic, hard to work with, mysterious past, yadda yadda yadda.  At some points I wish they would have just straight up told us about her past and stopped wasting screen time.  It manages to be entertaining when the kids are trying to outsmart the cops and vice versa, but then it all falls apart at the end.  Movies like this can be easily saved by an intelligent ending.  But instead anybody being outsmarted, they have the obligatory gunfight, with somebody hanging over a cliff and the whole bit.  When they do go for a plot twist or two they're really lazy about it.  Instead of filling in a peize of the puzzle that we didnt see, they just show us a different flashback of what happened in the murder scene.  Whoopdee do.  So, it has it's moments, and it's smart at points, but it keeps falling back on old thriller cliches that we've seen a billion times before.