The Imitation Game is the second biopic this season that attempts to portray a well known genius but like The Theory of Everything, Game somehow loses its way and seems to have trouble conveying what was so remarkable about its subject. As the marketing cleverly suggests, Alan Turing was indeed an enigma but director Morten Tyldum does little to shed any new light on his personal or professional affairs. It’s a very straightforward, easily digestable film and while it has an worthwhile story to tell, I can’t help but feel disappointed that it didn’t probe deeper into Turing’s mind.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays the legendary mathmetician with the same brand of affable arrogance that he’s perfected in the BBC series Sherlock. The film follows Turing during important stretches of his life but focuses primarily on his time as an MI6-recruited cryptanalyst during the Second World War. He leads a crack team of coding experts, including Joan Clarke (Keira Knightly) and Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode), to eventually break the daunting Nazi Enigma code and provide the Allied Forces with a tactical advantage that would eventually lead to their early victory in the War.

The wartime code breaking section of the movie is its most compelling, distilling the team’s years of struggle with the nigh indecipherable cryptograph into moments of crushing defeat and inspiring triumph. The film’s most poignant scene comes after the code is broken, in which the group’s knowledge of an impending Nazi attack must be kept confidential in order to keep the secrecy of their solution in tact. The scene delves further into the tragic irony of this realization, as one of the coders recognizes one of the Nazi’s targets as the boat on which his brother is serving. It’s a heartbreaking moment and a memorable emotional climax for the film.

Sadly, the portions of the story that involve Turing’s troubled times as a boarding school student and his personal post-War struggles that led to his eventual suicide are not nearly as affecting. The push-pull nature of the flashbacks and flash forwards is distracting and simply not worth it, given that there’s more than enough to dissect in the main mission storyline alone. Especially contrived is the repetition of a line about exceeding expectations that made me roll my eyes all three times that it was uttered. The movie is also awkwardly framed within an interrogation scene that never leads to anything that would justify its inclusion in the first place.

Despite these directorial flaws, The Imitation Game finds its most indespensible asset in Cumberbatch, who has a knack for unveiling layers of repressed emotion in his portrayals of brilliant men. Knightly also turns in a confident performance as a longtime partner of Turning’s, who wasn’t shy about going toe-to-toe with him on an intellectual and personal basis throughout his life. Unfortunately, the good work by the actors here is hindered by a lack of chronological cohesion and an overall shallow approach to a complicated historical figure.