I was impressed when I first saw this. Not only is the story packed with suspense -- a kidnapped woman has been buried with a day's worth of air and it's the cops' job to find out where she is before she suffocates -- but the performances are better than what we've come to expect from yarns about the police. Furthermore, not ONCE is detective Maura Tierney asked to hand over her badge and gun! In fact, Maura Tierney is quite alright. She's a decent actress and she's right for the part of a policewoman so guilt-ridden that she has a secret lover who burns her with cigarettes and otherwise torments her. She's not a glamor puss either and I liked that too. Julia Roberts would have spoiled it, not through any lack of talent but simply because of her refulgent beauty.Adrian Brody was a big surprise too. He's the character who buried the young woman alive, killed his accomplice for no particular reason, and now sits in the interrogation room being alternately bullied and cosseted by the police and the FBI in order to get him to squeal about the victim's burial place. He has the face of a Dead End Kid and the whining, contemptuous demeanor of a spoiled brat. It's a hoot when the FBI takes over the case, the menacing agent enters the room, surveys the iron-bound Brody, and goes into this detailed spiel about how horrible it is to die from a lethal injection. Brody listens impassively for a few minutes then looks up with a twisted smile and remarks, "What a stupid monologue." It's all so taut that you get caught up in the story, but it doesn't hold up well on a second viewing. First, you can't help noticing that there is a formulaic car chase through the streets of Manhattan and that it's lifted straight out of "The French Connection". The two drivers glare at each other and try to bump each other's car off the street, while angrily yanking at the wheel.Then you notice that, as a matter of fact, the whole film is modeled on "The Silence of the Lambs." Brody is a proletarian Hannibal Lecter -- smart, savvy, able to scan others for their weaknesses and then exploit them, an escape artist of a high degree. He teases the hell out of the cops, especially Maura Tierney. He promises to give her some hints if she'll tell him how she came by those cigarette burns on her arms.The problem is that Hannibal Lecter had a genuine reason for probing Jody Foster's psyche. He'd been penned up in solitary for years. And his curiosity was boundless. I mean, you MUST have curiosity as well as brains to endure the grueling routine of medical school, then psych internship, then years of private practice. But Brody's villain has no such motivation. He's as clever as a sewer rat but what does he get out of Maura Tierney's confession? Unlike Jody Foster's Big Reveal about the slaughter of the lambs, Tierney's isn't even particularly interesting. It's written flatly and Tierney doesn't bring it off.There's another thing that impressed me as slightly off on a second viewing. Maura Tierney commits homicide. She holds a gun on Brody, lying helpless in a pit, and she decides to bury him alive so she starts kicking dirt into the hole. But in the face of Brody's feculent mocking -- "Oh, yeah, bury me, gimme more, MORE!" -- she shoots him in the chest and kills him. That's not acting as an agent of justice. That's revenging yourself on someone for reasons of personal hatred, and it's usually called "murder."

Adrian Brody gives a very creepy tone to "Oxygen", which is a good thing. Maura Tierney is credible as a tormented cop. The screenplay about an ego driven kidnapper who idolizes Harry Houdini is different and intriguing. His ability to manipulate and outsmart the police and F.B.I. keeps things interesting and for about the first 75 minutes almost everything seems believable. Towards the end and especially with the ending, logic is completely suspended, the plot becomes contrived, and the audience is left with a preposterous conclusion. It is a real shame that "Oxygen" ends so badly, because the movie is highly watchable up until the wheels come off. - MERK

With a compelling cast and half decent screenplay this film had potential. The low budget didn't help. The cheezy cinematography didn't help. But it was the ending. The ending. Oh god, the ending. What a letdown. I give a lot of credit to Richard Shephard. He will make good films sometime soon. But what a crappy ending. As is the problem with most good thrillers, the villain is more likable than the hero. With everything so meticulously planned out, how could he not foresee the conclusion.Garbage.Again, I can only hope for better in the future from Mr. Shephard.Especially better endings.

There is some remarkably good acting in this factory-line "psychological thriller". I also quite enjoyed the on-location shooting in NY. Apart from these arguable caveats this is a film which, with the mad-hatter's tea party concept exposed half-way through the (undoubtedly excruciating) filming process, whoever was in charge of production lost heart and ran off the final cut thinking only of limiting the losses.Is the film the study of a schizophrenic thinking he's Houdini or an essay in dealing with self-destructing obsession? It doesn't know. Is it a The Silence of the Lambs bandwagonner? Of course, but looks more like a diluted TV spin-off. But the ideas are the good (well, OK) bit - there's a lot of potential in bringing characters' psychological issues into narrative parity with the more conventional thrust of the psych-thriller. Look at Jane Campion's In The Cut.No, the film is let down - dropped - by scrappy editing that undermines the acting (which is really very good indeed from both Tierney and Brodie under the circumstances), an excess of small, interpolated scenes designed to explain but which simply patronize and stun the pace - and then turn out to be cul-de-sacs anyway - and some of the worst continuity errors I've ever seen in a film. Ideal viewing for the cinematically mawkish 2/10