Covered with a thin layer of gloss, but consistently thrilling and engaging

Rating: 7/10 (30 May 2015)

Benedict Cumberbatch seems to be making a career out of playing troubled and flawed genius's, following his huge success as Sherlock Holmes in the TV series Sherlock and the upcoming - and hugely exciting - Dr. Strange in Marvel's upcoming film based on the sorcerer supreme. His finest work so far is in The Imitation Game as code-breaker Alan Turing, the unsung war hero who helped crack the apparently unbreakable Enigma machine used by the Germans during World War II, helping to save millions of lives in the process and shaving years off the war.
Turing was recognised as a prodigy from an extremely young age, and his cerebral superiority isolated him from others. He travels to Beltchley Park, where Commander Denniston (Charles Dance) interviews him as part of a recruitment process to form a cryptology team headed by chess champion Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode), tasked to break the Enigma code. Turing gets the job through sheer intellectual brilliance, but not through his condescending personality, which instantly puts him at odds with the rigid and impatient Denniston. When he joins the team, which also consists of John Cairncross (Allen Leech) and Peter Hilton (Matthew Beard), he wastes no time in voicing his desire to work alone and dismisses the input of the others as simple time-wasting.
Director Morten Tyldum and writer Graham Moore have not created a work of any great intelligence or subtlety here, and The Imitation Game plays very much by the standard biopic rule book. No great care goes into helping us understand the inner workings of the Enigma itself, or the work done by Turing and his fellow code-breakers, and the film very much relies on great acting and a fast pace. The scenes with Turing, Alexander et al hard at work has them with sleeves rolled-up and chewing pencils whilst staring at boards. We don't quite know what they're doing, but we are certainly urging them to achieve their goal, and, of course, this being a film about Turing, there's only so much of his work that can be squeezed into two hours.
The Imitation Game also helps make the story relevant to the modern day. At the beginning of the film, set after the war, Turing is burgled and his flippant dismissal of the investigating Detective Nock (Rory Kinnear) puts him under suspicion. He is arrested for participating in lurid acts with a man, a crime punishable by up to two years in prison back then. It all ties in nicely with the recent official apology from Gordon Brown, then-prime minister in 2009, and his official pardon by the Queen in 2014. Flashbacks of Turing's early childhood at a boarding school and his relationship with close friend Christopher Morcom (Jack Bannon) are peppered throughout. They help gain an understanding of Turing's love of cryptology and his emerging sexuality, and these scenes are finely played by the young Alex Lawther and do in no way hinder the flow of the film.
But the film's trump card is undoubtedly Cumberbatch. Although his delivery at times can border on stage-y, he has a great weight to his voice. His face exudes such intelligence and charisma that you just want to pick it apart to see what's under there. Keira Knightley too, who I haven't even mentioned yet, is a surprise revelation as Joan Clarke, a fellow prodigy puzzle-solver who, being a woman, had to be hidden away as regulations didn't permit women positions of worthy status. She is fierce and full of life, the polar opposite to the withdrawn and work-focused Turing. Yet the two develop an intriguing and entirely convincing platonic love affair, leading to their short-lived engagement in 1941. It's covered with a thin layer of gloss and a longer running time with more careful story development would have been beneficial, but The Imitation Game is consistently thrilling and engaging, bolstered by a great ensemble.