I decided to watch this with the great John hurt and the likeable elijah wood .It really is very dull and am so wanting to turn it off .But am intrigued as to who done it , trying g to stay awake for the next 46 minutes .

The plot: A disillusioned student and his cynical professor help the police try to solve a murder mystery based on mathematics and logic.I had high hopes for this movie, based on the opening. It was engaging, intelligent, and talking about some topics that I really enjoy. Unfortunately, I should have realized that it would degenerate into a pretentious mess, as it tried desperately to prove how witty the writers could be.Still, I was willing to accept that it was going to turn into a cheesy Seven clone. The cast is really impressive, and it at least pays lip service to some interesting ideas, even if they are a bit cursory or shallow at times. Then again, I doubt most people want to hear philosophy or mathematics lectures in the middle of their murder mystery. I'm not quite sure where the proper balance is, but I think Seven was much closer than The Oxford Murders.There are requisite red herrings, plot twists, and Sherlock Holmes style deductions. There are also romantic subplots, academic politics, and even something of a coming-of-age tale, about an idealistic young man who discovers, to his horror, that his idol is a colossal jerk. Although I identified more with the colossal jerk than the idealistic protagonist (the opposite of what you're supposed to do, I think), both characters are given time to shine and expound on their individual beliefs. Neither the romantic subplot nor the romantic interest herself are given as much attention, making them seem a bit like plot devices than fully-realized elements of the movie.This is an inoffensive movie that often feels like it could have been better. Near the end, I was getting a bit impatient, and I began trying to predict the movie's ending rather than concentrating on the movie itself. I wasn't entirely correct, but I was in the right ballpark. I'm sure that, if you care enough and pay close enough attention, you'll be able to do better than me. It doesn't take a logical genius to predict how a genre film will end once you've seen enough of them.

I have always been a fan of murder mysteries and after seeing the DVD in my video store, I thought the Oxford murders sounded pretty interesting with a slight dan brown edge to it. Having Elijah wood and john hurt in the two lead roles also prompted my interest too. After having watched it, I must say that I wasn't entirely taken with it. The acting was on par and I could sit and listen to john hurts voice all day but the story line was not badly executed but more like sluggishly executed. The script could have done with more tightening up, and a few scenes could have been deleted (such as the awful love scenes between Elijah wood and the actress who plays his love interest) The story has a great premise but that is far as my praise extends. I'm not saying I hate it but its not a film I would willingly go see again.

For the typical products of today's college degree courses, i.e. viewers with a smattering of philosophy or mathematical theory, this would-be intellectual romp might look like durned clever stuff. For viewers with two smatterings, it's more a case of irritating pretension. However, director and scriptwriter Alex de la Iglesia has quite a lot of fun with the arcane foibles of ivory tower academia, such as the rivalry between England's Ivy League universities, Oxford and Cambridge. There's even a gratuitous parody (contributes little if anything to the plot) of the momentous occasion (June 23, 1993) when Andrew Wiles announced at Cambridge the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem that he had developed while at Princeton (Refer IMDb's "Did You Know?" above). Yeah, that's the flavour of the piece.Is anyone unfamiliar with the final proposition (#7) in Wittgenstein's "Tractatus"? Here is the Pears/McGuinness translation (and more people ought to read this sentence and heed it): "What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence." Now you know. A self-parodying John Hurt has been invited to overact the role of Arthur Seldom, an Oxford don promoting his latest book - we certainly needed another weighty tome about Wittgenstein. Martin (Elijah Wood) is a brainy nerd (girls fall for him but) who's come all the way from Arizona in the hope that Prof Seldom will condescend to supervise his PhD studies. However it doesn't look as if his degree is going to get any further than some verbal point-scoring and blackboards getting filled with incomprehensible equations. Jim Carter grumbles away, endeavouring to fill the shoes of the late John Thaw, but a charismatic Inspector Morse he ain't.Aw forget it. Enjoy the story. It's not bad. Some decent lines of dialogue are provided for some competent actors (we don't get to see enough of the splendid Anna Massey - you can guess why). There are nifty insights about the unintended consequences of our trivial actions, or for that matter our best-laid plans. You might even decide at the end that the whole thing made quite a lot of sense. There are ingenious twists, that get ingeniously untwisted and then ingeniously retwisted. What's not to like? (You may want to watch it a second time, to spot the tricks.) BTW, that fluttering butterfly deep in the Amazon jungle triggering a hurricane way out in the Atlantic is an urban myth. If this movie "The Oxford Murders" inspires you to get into chaos theory, James Gleick wrote a book about it; and the Gribbin family business (popularisation of science) has a title, "Deep Simplicity" - a lot easier to read than Wittgenstein.