Pun Salad

I was a little surprised when a major character in this movie was "Professor Arthur Seldon". They're actually doing a movie about the legendary free-market English economist? Unfortunately, I misheard: the character's name is Arthur Seldom. Great name! They should have had roles for "Sibyl Rarely" and "Kenneth Knott-Offen" too! But that's why I'm not a professional screenwriter, I guess.

Here's the story: Martin (Elijah Wood), an idealistic grad student in mathematics, comes to Oxford with high hopes of studying under the legendary Seldom. He gets lodging with a curmudgeonley crone (who worked with Alan Turing on codebreaking back in the day), and her cello-playing daughter. Martin discovers that it's tough for an ex-Hobbit at Oxford: at their first encounter, Seldom (played by John Hurt) humiliates him in front of a large crowd. Worse, the crone turns up dead in her sitting room. This is very bad, because she was by far the most interesting character. Seldom and Martin pick up clues that this is the first in a series of murders, and they team up to investigate.

Seldom and Martin discuss philosophy, mathematics, and physics while they're sleuthing; it's as if the screenwriter hired a bright nine-year-old to take sketchy notes while eavesdropping on dorm room bull sessions at MIT, had someone translate those notes into Spanish, then someone else translate them back into English, and wrote the screenplay from the result. Pretentious, incoherent, and stupid.

Things would have been somewhat improved if they had a hideous creature burst out of Hurt's chest at some point; that's been known to work in at least one other flick. No such luck.

But on the good side, there is a decent little mystery going on here. And Leonor Watling is very easy to look at, playing a sexy nurse/suspect. In addition, if you're one of those sickos who wanted to see some Hobbit-on-Human action in the Lord of the Rings movies, this is probably as close as you're gonna get.