The Imitation is a good, solid movie: well-acted, well-written, well-shot, well-directed. You can't really fault it from a technical perspective. And yet for all its accomplishments, there's still something undeniably irksome about it. It's not the sort of movie that you'd go back to for seconds, nor does it contain a single scene that might be described as "unforgettable." Surely it needed one? Benedict Cumberbatch is good as Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing, of course, but his performance is also incredibly... well, performance-y. Through all his expressions and tics and idiosyncrasies, there's never a point where it isn't apparent that Cumberbatch is "acting," whilst the movie itself feels carved from a template - it feels efficient, rigid and ultimately predictable, even if you don't know the story. What's more blasphemous about The Imitation Game's standing in the Top 250 is that it outranks indisputable classics such as Jaws, The Terminator and Groundhog Day. That just isn't right, people. Do we really want to live on a planet Earth where such things are true?
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.