The Imitation Game, review: 'clever, calculated' Directed by: Morten Tyldum. Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Charles Dance, Mark Strong, Allen Leech, Tuppence Middleton, Rory Kinnear. Cert 12A; 113 min. The Imitation Game is a film about a human calculator which feels... a little too calculated. It's not that Alan Turing's life isn't teeming with interest or cinematic possibilities. And a hard-working, hard-thinking Benedict Cumberbatch does everything that this role, as scripted, could possibly demand of him. Somehow, though, this diligent mid-century biopic, with its cookie-cutter screenwriting and lacquered, nominate-me-for-everything sheen, manages to feel like a series of stories we've heard before, following the familiar contours of other films as if with tracing paper. Some of the comparisons being courted here might have been difficult to avoid. We're served a large, reheated hunk of A Beautiful Mind, of course, in Cumberbatch's portrait of another withdrawn, irascible maths genius no one understood. Turing and that film's John Forbes Nash might feel like biopic twins, but a braver film would have sought to differentiate itself, perhaps at all costs, from Ron Howard's ersatz 2001 Oscar-winner, rather than choosing a thousand ways to emulate it. As an account of the Enigma-cracking mission at Bletchley Park, Morten Tyldum's film is going to have a job on its hands not reminding Sunday-matinee fans of Enigma (2001), Michael Apted's pleasingly old-fashioned adaptation of the Robert Harris bestseller. Tyldum, best known for the gruesome hilarity of the Norwegian black comedy Headhunters, is straitjacketed by the squareness of his assignment here. With Keira Knightley on hand in Forties frocks, and Cumberbatch cycling through Blitz rubble to place us in period just so, the film even manages to feel like Atonement II: Code Warriors. A yet more fitting title, all things considered, is the one it was given. The film starts in 1951 Manchester with a suspicious robbery in Turing's home, and sets about doing a hamfisted job of juggling three main timeframes: the school years, the Bletchley years, and the persecuted aftermath. It's not a great sign that this script cosies up to the man so insistently as a lovable recluse, unable to grasp the point of jokes or deliver one if his life depended on it. His interview at Bletchley by Cdr. Alastair Denniston (Charles Dance) is a predictably cutesy business, hitting as many obvious character notes (difficult, brilliant, odd!) as can possibly be crammed into one scene. Lo and behold, he's recruited, and makes an instantly aloof impression on fellow code-crackers, including ladies' man Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode), hearty Scot John Cairncross (a useful Allen Leech) and some other guy (Matthew Beard) whose function, with all due respect to the mathematician Peter Hilton, we barely glean. Popular at school, were you? Hugh asks Alan when he tells them all something flatly rude about their mediocre problem-solving. For Graham Moore, who has approached script construction in a yet more dogged spirit, this line is the immediate cue for the first 1928 school scene, where Turing is played as an awkward, yearning misfit by the rather excellent Alex Lawther. His early inklings of same-sex desire coincide with great excitement at the possibilities of cryptography, as he passes coded messages (in every sense) back and forth with a dreamboat classmate (Jack Bannon). Meanwhile, back at Bletchley, help arrives in the shape of lightning crossword whiz Joan Clarke (Knightley), who agrees to help the team in their Nazi-thwarting enterprise, as long as she can do so within the respectable confines of the ladies' quarters. The whopping machine Turing invents to automate this process, Joan admits, is "all the girls in Hut Three can talk about." Knightley plays this tairibly posh bluestocking with amusingly clipped vowels and a welcome touch of camp: the film, like Turing, grows to need her. Cumberbatch does too - their scenes together are far and away the best here. There's only so much he can do with the ghostly contrivance of Turing's are-you-sitting-comfortably voiceover, and the script's habit of repeating themes by repeating exact lines, and Tyldum's insistence that he regularly throw papers in the air to energise another vexing argument about why no one's getting anywhere. Post-Sherlock, the star's natural intelligence is a gift but no longer a surprise, and his work here, entirely committed and clever though it is, feels so customised for awards voters to coo over, it may inspire rebellious thoughts. For my money he gave a more creative and risk-taking performance in a biopic no one saw, last year's otherwise iffy Julian Assange portrait The Fifth Estate. It's the lack of risk here that grates most. Turing was homosexual, got convicted for gross indecency in 1952, and committed suicide because of his persecution and loneliness. Cumberbatch can suggest all this, but only in outline, because the film backs away in embarrassment from showing a single encounter between him and another man. This project inches around the private life of a genius: though he gets to narrate, it adopts an extremely proper attitude towards what should stay private, which might strike some viewers as closer to 1952's prudishness than 2014's relative open-mindedness. It shouldn't matter in the slightest that Turing was gay. It shouldn't have ended his career in disgrace the way it did. But one can be forgiven, surely, for wondering, and wanting to see, if it mattered to him.