Murder by Numbers

Murder by Numbers (2002)

11 corrected entries

(3 votes)

Corrected entry: When the final fight on the derelict porch is over and the camera pans back from hanging over the cliff onto the porch, there is a discrepancy between the real house wall and the CG part of the scene. If you look carefully, you can see that two parts of the wall behind the two characters on the screen slide "out of place" as if they were shot from different angles.

Correction: I was watching this carefully, but I never saw the mistake happen. First, there is no pan shot from over the cliff back onto the porch. Second, though the background behind them is sliding slightly, this is because the house is old and shaky and the boards of the siding themselves are shifting under the weight of the characters. This mistake didn't make it into the final version of the movie.

Phoenix

Correction: I watched this through very carefully twice and I still don't see it on the DVD version. Chalk it up to projectionist error in the theatre, not a movie mistake.

Phoenix

Corrected entry: In the classroom scene where the students are taking a pop quiz, the teacher is pacing at the front of the room, about one or two metres from his desk as they all hand their papers to the front. A split second later, the camera cuts to a close shot of the teacher sitting at his desk and holding his glasses. There is no way he could have moved behind the desk and sat down that fast.

Correction: There is elapsed time in this scene. The teacher says "Exchange papers with your neighbor" when he is standing in front of the room, then says "And the answer to number 20 is D" when he is sitting down a second later with his glasses on. The movie skipped the bit in between where the teacher read off the answers to the quiz and the students corrected each other's quizzes, more than enough time for the teacher to sit down and put on his glasses. This is how Lisa was able to get Justin a passing grade.

Phoenix

Corrected entry: When Cassie and her partner are in her houseboat, Cassie's robe is loosely open in the first shot, but tightly closed up to her neck line with the following camera shot, before she leaves to sit on the dock.

Correction: This actually happens twice, but both times Cassie has her hands on her robe and the time and motivation to close it. The first time is when she sees Sam walking in, but it's not unusual for someone to cover up when an unexpected visitor walks in. The second time is after Sam mentions Carl Hudson, when Cassie again feels vulnerable and acts subconsciously to protect herself.

Phoenix

Corrected entry: When Cassie is in her boat house, her partner walks in and doesn't close the sliding door, but when he walks out he opens the door.

Correction: You can hear him close it offscreen while the camera is on Cassie.

Phoenix

Corrected entry: At the beginning of the film we see Sandra Bullock arrive at the crime scene, she is wearing a black turtle-neck type shirt under her jacket. The next scene we see her in is when she arrives at her boathouse with Ben's character, presumably coming from the crime scene, only now her turtle-neck is blue, and Ben's clothes are different as well.

Correction: Cassie is wearing a black scarf around her neck, the ends coming down the front of her body covering her shirt. It would make it appear that she had a black turtleneck on. When she gets to the boat, the scarf is hanging open, both ends down over her jacket. The partner is wearing the exact same clothes he had on at the crime scene.

ChiChi

Corrected entry: When Justin leaves Lisa's apartment after admiting that they killed Olivia, Lisa picks up the phone to call Cassie. She dials the phone number very quickly as if she had known it by heart. There is no way she could have memorized Cassie's cell phone number without looking it up.

Correction: Since Lisa had already talked to the Police, she could have gotten Cassie's cell phone number just in case anything happened with the boys. Lisa, could have memorized Cassie's number within a couple of days.

Corrected entry: When Cassie and her partner are questioning Richard in the gym he says, "Wow, I thought I was in trouble or something, but you really did find my shoes?" Yet when Richard is playing the recording back to Justin it plays back as Richard saying, "You found my shoes?" The recording left out the first sentence of his line.

Correction: He asked about his shoes twice.

Corrected entry: In the movie there is one scene where one of the killers dump the body by a stream and then pukes. The puke is close to the girl, but when Sandra Bullock investigates the scene the puke is now closer to the water.

Correction: We see Justin crossing the stream before he vomits.

Corrected entry: In the scene where the detectives are searching the dead girl's house, one of the crime lab techs inadvertently knocks over the stereo remote, causing the stereo to turn on. The problem is, the remote fell behind the stereo and being an infrared remote, it could not have caused the stereo to turn on. The only way the stereo could come on is if the infrared remote was pointed at the infrared sensor on the receiver on the front of the stereo.

Correction: Although this is true much of the time, I know that I can point my remote at certain spots on the ceiling or back wall of my livingroom and still have the appliance turn on.

Corrected entry: When Cassie Mayweather empties the trash can into the boot of her car the car's 'door open' warning alarm was constantly reminding her that the car's doors were not closed. The sound was conspicuously absent when the car's doors were open as she scuffled with Richard Haywood.

Correction: That sound is accually the "keys are in the ignition" sound and when cassie is fighting with Heywood the keys are not in the ignition, they are on the ground. When she is dumping the garbage the car is still running.

Continuity mistake: When Richard hugs Justin as they are talking about evidence Justin is giving away to the police, Justin's head moves from on Richard's shoulder to buried in his chest and back. (01:06:25)

Phoenix

More mistakes in Murder by Numbers

Justin: I enjoy taking indefensible positions and creating an argument for them.

More quotes from Murder by Numbers

Question: Could someone please explain what the title means and what numbers have to do with anything? I'm not a native English speaker and I don't get it.

Answer: It's like a paint-by-numbers, where a picture is outlined on a board, and each little piece of it has a number corresponding to a different color of paint. You paint in the spaces based on what the numbers tell you. Murder by numbers refers to the boys following all the "rules" about how to create the perfect murder: choosing a victim at random, etc. They're murdering based on what they've been told is the right way to do it.

Krista

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