Even worse than Enigma

Rating: 1/10 (18 March 2015)

If you know nothing about Alan Turing or the history of Bletchley Park, or you think "World War II" was a sequel to "World War", I suppose you might enjoy this film. However, if you are at all familiar with the history of Enigma or the life of Turing, my advice would be to give this an even wider berth than that nonsense with Dougray Scott.
Why Hollywood thinks that the Enigma story is so dull that they have to dress it up this way is beyond me. I laughed out loud several times, and not at anything funny. The script piles cliché on cliché and I found the whole experience embarrassing and rather offensive. Alan Turing was a complex and difficult individual, but here he is reduced to a comical cardboard cut-out. Charles Dance chewing the scenery as a ridiculous caricature of Alistair Denniston, an even more ludicrous villain than Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham, was too much to bear.
I couldn't think what "The Imitation Game" reminded me of for several hours, until I realized it was the inspired 1980s Comic Strip spoof "The Strike", in which a miner's memoire of the 1984 miners' strike is bastardized by a Hollywood studio for "dramatic effect", with Al Pacino parachuted in as union leader Arthur Scargill. Sadly, "The Imitation Game" didn't set out to be a spoof, though the end result is as much a biopic of Alan Turing as "Carry on Cleo" is a biopic of Julius Caesar.
There is a reason why Enigma is not on sale on DVD in the gift shop at Bletchley Park. I can't imagine they are in a great rush to clear space on the shelves for The Imitation Game either.