Despite a good amount of ‘stiff upper lip’ British patriotism conveyed by an ensemble cast of the country’s finest acting talent, combined with a thriller-inflected plot, The Imitation Game adds up to little more than a serviceable WWII drama built upon a simple, economical style of filmmaking which falls far too readily upon cliché and melodrama than the subject matter deserves.

Man of the moment Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing, the real life historical figure who deciphered the code for the German enigma machine, which was used during the conflict to encrypt German military tactics and other messages, by inventing his own machine which could deduce the Enigma machine’s settings from millions of possibilities. Featuring a cast which includes Keira Knightley, Mark Strong and Charles Dance, The Imitation Game tracks the attempts made by the top-secret British initiative established at Bletchley Park to assist the war-effort not with gunfire, but with the mind.

The focus of the film is very much on the figure of Turing and his life both before the war, during his formative years at public school, and after. Darting back and forth through time, director Morten Tyldum (a Norwegian director, whose best known work prior to this was 2011’s lackluster Headhunters) establishes the film primarily as a character study of Turing, although most of this is accomplished by Cumberbatch’s performance rather than the filmmaker’s execution of the narrative. But even in this respect no new ground is being explored by Cumberbatch, who appears to be falling back upon the Sherlock playbook of character traits and mannerisms affected by the solitary genius whose social awkwardness and inability to ‘read’ certain social cues casts him as the outsider looking in. It’s not that Cumberbatch’s performance isn’t great, it’s simply that he’s not doing anything particularly new, and the film risks limiting his ability by it’s clear extension of the actor’s celebrated performance as Conan Doyle’s detective. Clearly the film typecasts the actor for his, admittedly brilliant, ability to portray the narcissistic, self-centered prodigy.

As frequently as the film relies on Cumberbatch’s past performance, The Imitation Game too readily depends upon the tropes of melodrama and narrative construction to shape both rhythm and dramatic tension. The various instances of historical inaccuracy; the sluggish use of historical footage and CGI; the cliche’d montage sequences in which images of Turing exerting himself mentally whilst working on the machine are inter-cut with images of him exerting himself physically by jogging; the code-cracker whose brother works on the vessel which the team must knowingly sacrifice in order to maintain the secret that the Enigma machine has been cracked: it just all feels too convenient and mediocre. More awkward are the various strands which attempt to extend the significance of the film beyond the confines of the screen. From the tongue-in-cheek allusions to the ‘digital computers’ of the future, to the crude moments in which the era’s backwards gender and sexual politics are spuriously forced under the microscope of the camera to be judged by the contemporary viewer: such moments mostly just come across as forced.

The Imitation Game does provide a functional treatment of this episode of WWII, but one should read the film’s opening title card – ‘Based on a True Story’ – as more of a cautionary warning regarding the type of filmmaking at hand, than as a mark of cinematic accomplishment.