Kind Of Insulting To The Hero...And The Viewer

Rating: 6/10 (20 February 2015)

Benedict Cumberbatch is pretty good throughout but it seems he gets the best lines of Graham Moore's oh-so-witty screenplay early on; after that it's simply a run-of-the-mill Weinstein Brothers presentation, burnished with the usual prettiness that makes it nothing more than Oscar chum. (In fact, it's a perfect example on how the politics of Oscar campaigns trivialize the whole thing.) The film concerns itself with the tortured life of Alan Turing, whose machine eventually cracked the "unbreakable" Nazi Enigma code. Moore writes him as a compilation of idiosyncrasies and throws everything together into a blur that appears to be Asperger's Syndrome mixed with childhood trauma and homosexuality--it all seems so easy to diagnose that very little of it ultimately rings true, and when Moore tries to develop Turing's emotional growth midway through, you know the jig is up as to what the film expects you to feel. It's kind of an insult to Turing to simplify him so easily and to the viewer for not being respected enough to deal with complexity. There's a fair amount of suspense generated (what will be the "aha" moment that allows Turing and his group of math whizzes to crack the code?) but a dull Soviet spy subplot clutters the overall feel of the second half. With Keira Knightly, who specializes in period pieces in which she generates zero interest. The director is Morten Tyldum, also showing very little in the way of differentiation. Recommended only for Cumberbatch's performance, which keeps you engaged through his puppy-dog expressions; if the script gave him more opportunities to be as much fun as he is the beginning, the film would have been far more successful.