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Enigma film review
ENIGMA
Running time: 117 mins
Starring: Dougray Scott, Kate Winslet, Jeremy Northam, Saffron Burrows
Consider the wealth of talent involved in transferring Robert Harris's WWII codebreaking bestseller to the big screen: directed by Michael Apted (The World is Not Enough), written by theatrical wunderkind Tom Stoppard, produced by Mick Jagger and starring an up and coming British actor (Scott, star of last year's Mission Impossible 2) alongside an established English icon (Winslet). Given the credentials of all involved, you might think you were on safe ground and about to enjoy a solid spy thriller. Unfortunately, you would be wrong in this assumption.
This is a piece of filmmaking of extraordinary ineptitude, a sorry affair that is confusing, unthrilling and worst of all, extremely boring. It is such a jumbled mess that you wonder if everyone packed up when filming finished and didn't bother to watch the final edited version. The only enigma here is how such a promising story could have ended up as one of the year's biggest disasters.
The story is set in Bletchley Park, centre of the Allies' listening campaign against the Germans during the war (and back in the news last year when one of the fabled Enigma coding machines was stolen and sent to Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman).
Starting as it unwisely means to go on with flashback after flashback, the film tells the story of codebreaker par excellence Tom Jericho (Scott), a genius from Cambridge whose mind has become shellshocked - not from the terror of battle but from the effect of falling in love with Bletchley's most beautiful woman Claire (Saffron Burrows).
Tom has been called back to Bletchley for two reasons: Claire has disappeared and there is suspicion that she may have been a spy, and more worryingly his groundbreaking work on the Enigma decoding machines has been rendered obsolete by new encryption techniques deployed by the Germans. News of a marauding group of U-boats hunting down American ships in the North Atlantic has prompted Tom's superiors (led by a slippery Jeremy Northam) to reemploy the maverick Jericho in an attempt to intercept the German signals.
Why then does the film fail to work given that the plot is no worse than any other standard military picture? Simply because the parts do not gel in any shape or form to make a cohesive whole. Apted's direction is rushed, often leaving the viewer wondering what exactly is going on. The script is simply woeful, loaded with clichés and devoid of any wit or style. The editing is a shambles: it is often impossible to know if we are watching a flashback or not and if so what the effect of the flashback is meant to be. The production values are cheap and shoddy and fail to make the film look eye-catching in any way. Given such negatives, it is hardly fair to lump blame on the cast, but Scott does his promising career little good with a leaden performance as the misfit at the centre of the mystery. Winslet is little more than fluff as the frumpy housemate of Burrows who decides to help Jericho in his task.
If this were a BBC drama viewers would write in to complain about it being a waste of license payers' money. Unfortunately, cinemagoers will have little recourse to such action and may be lured by an attractive trailer or the draw of the stars involved. They should be urged to keep their money in their pockets rather than waste it on such a disappointing and embarrassing effort.
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