Murder by Numbers is torn between wanting to act like a Barbet Schroeder drama and being a Warner Bros. thriller with Sandra Bullock. The story is a powerful one, at times told well -- but moments of force exist within a work that feels more like product than art, and things end up disturbing for all the wrong reasons.

The film cuts between two Los Angeles detectives and a pair of strange high school lads. The cops are new partners: Bullock stars as a hard-bitten gal who spews out one-liners and looks like she's seen it all before; Ben Chaplin plays a fresh-faced kid just promoted to the homicide division. Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt play the boys, who are spoiled but unsatisfied young guys, and together form a bond from which no good can come.

Gosling gets a kick out of manipulation -- his wealth has given him popularity, which has given him a cocky smirk, which has in turn given him a need to see how far he can push his surroundings. Pitt is academic, distant, awkward; he's seduced by Gosling's fascination with his scientific mind and provoked by his suggestions that it would be weak not to use it for plotting crime.

While Leopold and Loeb planned and committed murder to prove their brilliance, the characters played by Gosling and Pitt do so because they think "crime is the only true act" and "only in murder or suicide can one prove oneself free". The dynamic is the same -- somehow these guys have grown up without human empathy, and however they mask it, are driven to kill by feelings of arrogance and superiority. When they get together, they bring out each other's darkest musings and plotting skills, and violence is the inevitable result.

Murder by Numbers has elements of police procedural, because it's a story of killers and cops, but we often have information from one side that the other is struggling to discover, and it's absorbing to watch the reactions of characters as the net closes in. Flashbacks of Gosling and Pitt describing how they're going to plant confusing forensic evidence on their victim's body, for example, are intercut with shots of Bullock and Chaplin looking frustrated at the inconclusiveness of test results. We are shown in detail how the killers' relationship disintegrates, and the way it all happens because of their specific needs and flaws.

Most of this is written and directed with tautness and intelligence, but small hallmarks of studio planning go a long way in giving the film a feel of construction. Bullock's investigative skills are those of a typically Hollywood superhero cop; she makes connections we can hardly imagine a real policewoman making, such as doubting that her original suspect could be guilty because he seems to fit the profile of a murderer too well. Her character is also given a fuzzy and random back-story, so that we can get the obligatory shots of her sitting alone at night nursing glasses of scotch (she lives on a houseboat, but I'm sure Martin Riggs knows his camper van was far more moody). There are the usual complications with a captain who wants the case at hand wrapped up despite all protestations. And one whole plot thread seems to exist solely to show Bullock in a sex scene.

I can sit through a few cop movie clichés if a movie absolutely requires them, but Murder by Numbers does not. The murder plot at its center is one of such sickness that when it's put in the midst of the other stuff, it feels... inappropriate. I would advise Schroeder to look at Seven (1995) as a guide of how to make a slick investigative picture while sidestepping conventional traps, except this is the guy who directed Reversal of Fortune, and he should know better already.

All that's left to discuss are the performances, which are as uneven as the rest of the content. Bullock, as always, plays a character whose manner is bothered and unsettled, and if Speed and Miss Congeniality let us identify with her annoyance while films like 28 Days and The Net simply gave her obnoxious character traits, she here seems distant, and we can't quite figure her out. Chaplin uses up all his energy nailing a convincing American accent, leaving himself unable to inject any personality into his role.

And then we have Pitt and Gosling, who, through subtle ticks, make themselves strange, intense and fascinating. As in Bully, Pitt does a good job of acting pathetically in over his head. Gosling continues to build on the promise he showed in The Believer, seeming convinced of the wickedest things and charming enough to speak about them with a conviction that steamrolls over the obvious logical holes. I've said before that these guys would have been much better choices than poor Hayden Christensen to fill the role of Anakin Skywalker, but what the hey, I'll say it again.

(Review also posted at http://www.ukcritic.com.)

Released by Warner Bros. and rated "R" for violence, language, a sex scene, and brief drug use.