Recencies van critici

The Imitation Game is extremely conventional, and actually pretty shoddy in its construction. The flash-forwards were handled in a very banal way, and there were scenes when I was confused as to where I was in time. I'm baffled, in general, by the film's accolades, unless it's just for the soppy sentimentalized reason that Turing was gay and persecuted for it.

[It's] bland, Oscar-friendly and rife with small annoyances. Keira Knightley, oozing Girl Power, doesn't convince for a moment as a nerdy misfit dominated by strict parents (why does she keep being cast in period dramas?). The ironies, e.g. that socially awkward Turing is an expert at codes but doesn't know the ‘codes' between people, are stated with sledgehammer subtlety.

Indifferently directed by Morten Tyldum with a thin, clichéd, sentimental script by Graham Moore, The Imitation Game is nevertheless something of a pleasure, purely because the actors rise above the material, bringing to their characters their own knowledge of the complex actual persons they play on screen.

[Turing's] story is so unbelievably horrifying and unjust that to make a glossy, largely feel-good bit of craven, Masterpiece Theater–ready awards bait like The Imitation Game out of it feels downright dastardly. After a couple hours of the most standard British wartime melodramatics and eye-glazing visual dullness Turing's tragedy is treated as a last-act nuisance, like a few final crumbs brushed from an otherwise shiny lapel.

Like a proficient but unassuming quarterback, Tyldum manages the game well enough for the great Cumberbatch to chew scenery. The actor crafts a tightening ball of nerves and anxiety with Turing, elevating the man beyond mere oddball and giving him real internal conflict and external doubt. Even if the film struggles with many of the same pratfalls that hinder Big Eyes and Unbroken, such as easy resolution of human conflicts, it remains an effortless, charming and sometimes endearing throwback.

To anyone trying to turn this story into a movie, the choice seems clear: either you embrace the richness of Turing as a character and trust the audience to follow you there, or you simply capitulate, by reducing him to a caricature of the tortured genius. The latter, I'm afraid, is the path chosen by director Morten Tyldum and screenwriter Graham Moore in The Imitation Game, their new, multiplex-friendly rendering of the story.

This is such Weinstein Company awards-bait that you want to throttle the film for holding your attention as well as it does, even as it makes a simplified mockery of a very complicated man... [The real problem is] in the way the film treats Turing's homosexuality—which, because of England's inhuman antigay laws, led to his postwar disgrace and chemical castration—as its own parallel (and impossible) problem to solve. Not once is Turing's torment over his same-sex attraction at all believable...

Setting aside some profanity and half a dozen conversations about being gay, The Imitation Game could have been released without much trouble in 1951, the year in which a lot of the story is set. It actually might have been more enjoyable as an old mid-scale, black-and-white drama by the director Joseph Losey. As it is, the movie has a tiresome sense of old-fashioned propriety.

A handsome, mediocre prestige production. Begging forgiveness, it's the film equivalent of a pretty bouquet tossed in the general direction of Turing's columbarium, carrying a card reading "Oops.

If there's a prime auteur to this film, I'd say it's the screenwriter, Moore... In The Imitation Game he meshes hard-edged characters, true occurrences, and dramatic fabrications with similar éclat. He even inserts a notorious Soviet spy into Turing's code-breaking group. It's a typically bold Moore touch, unexpected but never arbitrary: it trenchantly underlines the risks of ideological wrestling among allies.

Graham Moore's screenplay does an impressive job of simplifying, condensing, and distilling what actually happened into a series of accessible "eureka!" moments, and The Imitation Game is at its best when it focuses on the collision between cryptography and proto-programming. The film's efforts to function as a character study, on the other hand, are decidedly clumsy, with Cumberbatch working a little too hard at making Turing a socially inept robot who learns how to pass as human.

Above all else, The Imitation Game is a terrific actors' showcase. [Cumberbatch] plays Turing, boldly, as a spiky, straight-backed savant. He's refreshingly unlikeable, yet his jagged social awkwardness only makes his later, bumbling attempts at "normal" social interaction with his laddish peers all the more touching to behold. Keira Knightley, dispensing proto-feminist rejoinders with glee, is also impressive as the spirited sole female member of the team, later Turing's sham wife.