Directed by Alex de la Iglesia

A serial killer a on the loose in Oxford, clever dons, sexy nurses, academic jealousies and an innocent abroad... we're in Morse-land here for this oddly stilted, uneven and pretty unenthralling mystery based around the mathematicians and musicians of Oxford, an Argentine book set in England translated into an English film by a Spanish director. Britfilm denizens such as John Hurt, Anna Massey and Jim Carter supply thespian muscle, while the outsider hero, in the book an Argentine, here becomes American maths student Elijah Wood.

The book is a pretty good page-turner of a mystery novel in the old fashioned English mode of Agatha Christie and Colin Dexter. Big on bamboozling talk and ideas and short on action, its pleasures come from puzzle-solving, and its layman's dips into the fascinating world of Wittgentstein, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Schrodinger's cat, etc etc. There's also some interesting England-as-see-by foreigners scene-setting and a truly disturbing and possibly actionable dark description of Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital.

Unfortunately, this kind of material, though fine in the slow-moving one-to-one medium of books, is not the easiest thing to turn into popular film, and acceptable suspension of disbelief turns into preposterousness when short-cuts, fancy extras, and inexplicable changes in plot are introduced to give crowd appeal. John Hurt as the curiously named Professor Seldom does his sexy-voiced sardonic turn as only he can, but there's no real complexity there, and Elijah Wood is often just tiresome. Dominique Pinon for once fails to convince as a nutter. And poor old Jim Carter has the unenviable task of making the ploddiest detective this side of Conan Doyle's Lestrade credible.

There are considerable incidental pleasures, however, chief among which is Alex Cox's all too brief cameo of dotty professor, in rapid flashback sporting a variety of period hairdos and a lessening number of limbs - hard to say which is more alarming. Another actor enjoying himself hugely as he bounds over the top is Burn Gorman as the ultimate mad mathematician, all blazing eyes and thick Russian accent - he even gets to wear one of those flappy black cloaks that dastardly villains used to sport in B movies. Worth a chuckle, too, is the strange transmogrification of Fermatt's Last Theorem into Bormatt's, raising expectations that Sacha Baron Cohen might just pop up to cover a blackboard with mathematical symbols.

The bodies pile up, with many a twist, but you don't really care, emotionally or intellectually, who dun'em. And perhaps more puzzling even than Bormatt's Theorem is the proposition that Elijah Wood is instantly irresistible to older women.

Seen at Empire Cinema Newcastle, 4 May 2008