Feature | Lights, Camera, Action! – The Imitation Game (Movie Review)

The Imitation Game (UK Rating: 12A)

However, it's a film that seems to have bigger ambitions than the BIFAs. After all, a certain Harvey Weinstein has put both money and the weight of his publicity machine behind it, which immediately begs the question as to whether he's found this year's Philomena and whether it will score come Oscar time.

The story of Alan Turing (Cumberbatch) is told in a series of flashbacks, prompted by a police investigation into a break-in at his house. It was these enquiries that ultimately exposed his homosexuality - illegal at the time - and culminated in his suicide in 1954. Most of the film is set during World War II when he was looking after the team charged with cracking the Germans' hitherto impenetrable Enigma Code, but also interwoven are scenes from his schooldays and later life in the 1950s. He wasn't just the mathematical genius who saved hundreds of thousands of lives by breaking the code, he's now also regarded as the father of modern computing, yet his full story only emerged in the late 80s and he eventually received a Royal pardon last year.

His interpretation is surprisingly physical, with the Turing given a slightly lop-sided walk, a posture that, alongside his difficulty in communicating and empathising with other people, marks him out as a misfit. Cumberbatch also gives a beautifully intricate performance, multi-layered and moving, and it's his best movie acting to date.

So good is it that it proves to be the film's dominant force, instead of being an integral part of it. Very simply, that's because the movie isn't on the same level as its star. There are some really clumsy moments - the cliché of a young newspaper vendor shouting out the latest war headlines while evacuees queue up at the railway station, for instance. It over-labours its messages to the extent that some lines seem to have been written in capital letters and double underlined. The detective story in the early scenes is also an uncomfortable fit with the rest of the film's rather conventional narrative.

7/10

Very Good - Bronze Award

The Imitation Game belongs so much to Benedict Cumberbatch that it's perilously close to being a disadvantage. Thankfully, the true story of Alan Turing is more than interesting enough, both as a biography and a piece of war history, bringing the story of a backroom hero to a wider audience. The film's clumsy, sometimes heavy-handed approach, though, means that it lags well behind its glittering star.