Wonderfully acted but too false and trite

Rating: 6/10 (3 January 2015)

My main problem with based-on-reality movies like The Imitation Game is that the reality was so much richer than the movie.
Turing was a genius, which could have been shown in entertainingly accurate ways. However, he wasn't anywhere near solely responsible for making a machine to break Enigma. And there wasn't just a small clutch of codebreakers at Bletchley Park - the British devoted huge manpower to this crucial effort.
The screenwriter added a collection of largely one-dimensional foils for Turing: the cruel patrician supervisor who cared about his pride more than about beating the Nazis; the handsome cad of a chess champion who abused Turing and assaulted his machine; the detective who broke rules to conduct an obsessive investigation into a burglary of Turing's home that just didn't smell right.
Perhaps the most jarringly absurd moment came when Enigma had been broken. Immediately, someone assembled a map of all ships and submarines in the North Atlantic or whatever (based on Nazi messages) and one of the codebreakers blurted out that a group of U-boats was only 20 to 30 minutes away from attacking a British convoy. Well, sure - doesn't every mathematician know what speed a U-boat pack makes relative to a ship convoy? And then one codebreaker had his watch-me-act-and-break-your-heart moment, when he realized his brother was aboard one of the boats that would be attacked. (This did not really happen, of course.) Ugh.
Cumberbatch led a wonderful cast that pulled all the levers to make the audience feel sympathy, and the production values were terrific. But so much of it felt like a paint-by-number exercise ... it's a pity that a "realer" version of Turing's amazing life couldn't have been devised.