Movie Review: Death by politeness

The story of British mathematician Alan Turing is certainly worth telling.

Without his work both computers and the Allied victory in World War 2 might not have existed. Unfortunately, Turing was homosexual, a crime in the UK until 1967. He was convicted in 1952 and chemically castrated. He fatally poisoned himself aged 44 in 1954. In 2013 Queen Elizabeth publicly pardoned Turing - too little too late for the man who helped break the Enigma code, saving untold lives as the German war machine was defeated.

With eight Oscar nominations, The Imitation Game - Norwegian director Morten Tyldum's first English feature - has captured hearts at the Academy. However, it is an infuriatingly polite, very British exercise that would have worked just as well, if not better, as a BBC miniseries.

Written by Graham Moore and based on a book by Andrew Hodges, the film begins in 1951 with a visit by Manchester detective Robert Nock (Rory Kinnear) to the home of Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) after a reported burglary. This piques Nock's interest and allows Moore to engineer a narrative structure that jumps back and forward in time, a device that makes the film slightly more engaging but isn't utilised to explore Turing's deeper character.

Cut to 1939 and the brilliant 27-year-old Turing, lacking a sense of humour and social skills, is being interviewed for a job in cryptography at Bletchley Park by naval commander Denniston (Charles Dance, doing the World War 2 version of his sly, nasty Game of Thrones patriarch, Tywin Lannister).

Moore then flashes back to Turing's schooldays, where we see him being bullied and where he develops his first tragic man crush on fellow pupil Christopher.

Turing's thinking is conveyed in mutters and head shakes rather than interesting visual exploration but Cumberbatch gives an empathetic performance.

Turing's homosexuality is not mentioned directly until an hour in , when he makes a neat confession to a colleague after getting engaged to a protegée, Joan Clarke. As Clarke, Keira Knightley's bottom lip trembles predictably in an approximation of what might happen when a nice young lady in the 1940s is upset, but the script does little more than carve out her character as a convenient sounding board for Turing.

As a piece of cinema, it needed to be more like Turing himself - braver, smarter and less eager to please.

What others say

A film that shows a faltering faith in the intelligence of its viewers.

Anthony Lane, newyorker.com

An immersive true story that laces dizzying tension with raw emotion.

Peter Travers, rollingstone.com

Cumberbatch delivers one of the year's finest pieces of screen acting, cold detachment and acute sensitivity at the same time.

A.O. Scott, New York Times

It's overcomplicated, and yet at the same time somewhat simplistic. It never quite brings everything together into a dramatic whole.

Stephen Whitty, New Jersey Star-Ledger