The Riddle (2007)

I watched the first 0:8:33 of the film and then had to stop it and press pause. I couldn't believe my eyes at such a terrible historical mistake!!At 8 min 33 seconds, there is a close-up of "A View of Rochester with a Section of the Aqueduct." As the narrator was describing Rochester in Kent, England, we are shown this image--an 1830 wood engraving of Rochester, NY on the Erie Canal! I recognized it right away since I grew up on the Erie Canal and that picture is well-known in the museums all along the canal. This is shockingly bad work on the part of the director and screenwriter--and if that team had had any historians on the crew, they wouldn't have made such an egregious error. The appeal of this film was its cast-- actors like Derek Jacobi and Vanessa Redgrave --but that wasn't enough to make me continue watching it after that bungling error insulted my intelligence. Certainly a Brit from Rochester would also have noticed that there was never an aqueduct in Kent over the River Medway: at least not one that looked the same as the one in Rochester, NY. I'm sure the film editors were all thinking, "Eh, no one will even notice." Well, guess what...? Someone did. :(

What a shame that some good talent was wasted. This is a tedious and overly self-conscious movie, that could tell its story in half the time. Is that Derek Jacobi under that beard doing two roles? Gosh, who would have guessed.The emotional payoff a the end was weak and unsatisfying. Certainly not worth enduring the padded length of the movie for. I felt quite let down.The sound was dreadful. First, they used stock music. Second, it was so loud during some of the dialog, that the words were hard to make out. Only three sound crew, and a trainee? There were more people listed in the credits for either the accounting or the legal.Some of the camera work was quite good though, and the actors did a good job with a mediocre script.Not a good use of viewing time, at least for me.

Famous as the British film so bad it had to be given away for free with a newspaper, the quality of this sub-Children's Film Foundation "thriller" can be guessed from the abnormal number of 10/10 votes it gets and the large number of rave reviews from posters with no posting history and no other reviews to their name. The regulars know what this mean, the gullible might be conned. If they do dip into the waters of this one they won't last long before it drags them under. Technically inept with the boom mike getting into shot or the reflections of the crew visible it just goes on forever in a forgetful sub-DAVINCI CODE on $5 a day way. The end is just insulting but don't worry. It's not as if you'll get that far!

It doesn't surprise me that the makers of this hopeless movie couldn't find a UK distributor, and then had to release it as a free DVD with a Sunday newspaper. The distributors could clearly see what the film-makers and the Sunday newspaper couldn't, that this was one movie that just wasn't going to recoup its costs.Since it's a thriller about riddles, it would have helped if they'd picked a lead actor who could enunciate properly, rather than the mumbling Vinnie Jones who appears to pronounce "riddle" as "riell". And it would have helped if the dialogue hadn't been swamped by noisy locations or scenes flooded with distracting and inappropriate music. The plot is ludicrous: The lost Charles Dickens story supposedly helps our hero solve a series of modern murders, but so would a copy of Herge's Adventures Of Tintin, since the link between Dickens and Jones is more non-existent than tenuous. And we have the ridiculous premise that a would-be investigative journalist who lays his hands on a previously undiscovered Dickens manuscript, would take several days to read it, just so that flashbacks to Dickens can continue to be played throughout the movie, as if they had some connection to it. Which they don't. I mean, if you found a new Dickens manuscript, wouldn't you just go somewhere quiet and read it ? The film ends with one of those surprise revelations that have become mandatory since The Sixth Sense, but in this case it doesn't so much surprise you as insult your intelligence. If the film is suddenly going to turn supernatural at the twelfth hour, then revealing that Vinnie Jones is a robot might have been more acceptable. It might not have seemed so turgid if the film had been stylish, but it isn't. And in several places it appears decidedly amateur: There's a scene where a table is laid with a 60's jump-cut technique, but they haven't made sure that the person actually laying the table is completely out of frame between the cuts. Consequently, you can see things changing at the edge of frame, when you're really supposed to be watching things changing at the centre of frame. A good rule in movie-making is: If you don't understand how to do a technique then try something else.The real riddle is why anyone thought it would be a good idea to make this movie in the first place.