The Leopold-Loeb murder case from 1924 has always been an attractive subject for dramatists, on both the boards and the screen. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 “Rope,” based on Patrick Hamilton’s play, was a thinly-disguised rumination on the motives behind the crime, though the picture is best-known today not for its content but for the director’s misguided decision to shoot the whole thing in long, uncut takes; it strikes one, with its stilted performances and pseudo- philosophical tone, unbearably stagy today. In 1959 Richard Fleischer offered “Compulsion,” a much more faithful treatment of the case based on Meyer Levin’s play; it was certainly an earnest, carefully crafted piece, but typical of its time it was primarily a message tale, which gave Orson Welles a meaty speech to deliver against capital punishment in the role of defense counsel Clarence Darrow. A decade ago Tom Kalin offered the artsy, visually pretentious “Swoon,” which used the episode as a device to comment upon the effects of homophobia. In 1985, John Logan unveiled a new stage treatment, “Never the Sinner,” in Chicago, where the murder occurred; it was remounted in the late ’90s. And, of course, there have been numerous treatments of the crime on documentary TV programs. Now screenwriter Tony Gayton has constructed what’s essentially a modern version of the story in which two arrogant high school youths, confident in their own superiority on both philosophical and class grounds, undertake a methodically-planned random murder to get the thrill both of the act itself and of fooling the authorities. He tells their tale in conjunction with what amounts to a police procedural involving a troubled but brilliant female detective who teams with a new male partner to prove their guilt even when superiors doubt the rightness of her intuition about the case. The result, called “Murder by Numbers,” has been put onto the screen by Barbet Schroeder with his usual high degree of craftsmanship, and it boasts fine performances by rising young actors as the two perpetrators. In the final analysis, however, it doesn’t prove a very compelling film: despite its technical proficiency, it proves more lumbering and obvious than dramatically strong or intellectually riveting.

There are a couple of reasons for this. One is the concentration of the narrative on the police side of things; this part of the script perhaps had to be emphasized to give the film a “heroic” center, which seems necessary to get most studio projects greenlit nowadays, but it’s the most conventional, dispensable element of the story. Sandra Bullock does what she can with the role of Cassie Mayweather, the hard-bitten, smart-talking detective who constantly rubs her bosses and colleagues the wrong way but is, at center, deeply troubled by an incident in her past which the picture gradually reveals; but the role is basically a walking cliche, and Cassie’s secret becomes obvious to viewers long before the film finally discloses it. Bullock falls back onto her customary likableness to secure audience sympathy, and it’s not quite enough. Nor does Ben Chaplin bring much to the party as her new partner Sam Kennedy, who’s predictably torn between loyalty to her (something made difficulty by a hot sexual connection between them that arises early on) and deference to their boss, Captain Cody (R.D. Call, the gruff, unsupportive sort of chief familiar from innumerable TV cop shows) and the unctuous D.A. (Tom Verica) who had an unhappy fling with Mayweather in the not-too-distant past; Chaplin is as blank and uncharismatic as he proved opposite Nicole Kidman in the recent “Birthday Girl.” The trajectory of the “police” half of the picture’s plot is hackneyed stuff, and while the actors try to instill some life into it, they prove unequal to the task.

On the other hand, the murderers are a potentially intriguing pair, and the actors playing them have real spark. Ryan Gosling, who moved well past teen heartthrob status with his ferociously convincing turn as a Jewish neo-Nazi in the little-seen “The Believer,” is silkily charming and condescending as the more aggressive Richard Haywood, and Michael Pitt puts the dour, deadpan appearance he wasted in the prurient “Bully” to far better use as the intellectual, emotionally hungry Justin Pendleton. Had Gayton and Schroeder focused on these two, “Murder by Numbers” might have been a compelling piece. As it is, their relationship is presented in a muddled, incoherent way, with a strong streak of homoeroticism murkily obscured by a subplot concerning their rivalry over a winsome blonde classmate named Lisa (Anne Bruckner)–as well as by the fact that their victim is female rather than the boy Leopold and Loeb killed (perhaps in today’s climate the original facts would have seemed too tawdry). Gosling and Pitt pull out all the stops, but ultimately Richard and Justin emerge as a writer’s contrivances rather than as credible, flesh-and-blood individuals. (The whole Nietzschean subtext, moreover, is even mustier than it was when Hamilton employed it in “Rope.” And at least the killers in Hitchcock’s picture didn’t have to don murder outfits that look like cheap replicas of spacesuits.)

Still, Schroeder, working with cinematographer Luciano Tovoli, gives the picture a classy look reminiscent of their previous collaborations on “Reversal of Fortune” and “Single White Female.” Unfortunately, “Murder by Numbers” could have been better served by some of the grittiness that the director brought to his last picture, “Our Lady of the Assassins,” and the photographer to his recent film with Francis Veber, “The Closet.” Nothing they might have done, however, could have saved the big final confrontation between the boys and Cassie in a dilapidated house high on a cliff overlooking the ocean. The sequence is utterly standard fare, closing with a twist far less telling that the makers intend.

“Murder by Numbers” isn’t cheap or disreputable. But don’t count on it for anything beyond a modest level of competence–a disappointment in view of the possibilities.