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How sad is this?

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Absolutely Fantastic

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

This film was pure trash. Not the worse film ever. If it were to be broken down, the acting was good enough to get the job done but the script was SO out there and so stupid that one was left thinking, "Where did my life go?" Even Vanessa Redgrave~ whom I love (and is the reason I watched this) was wasted. Utterly wasted. She didn't even leave an impression. The directing was so distant that non of the characters left me much of anything, but to see Redgrave leave nothing. Her part was nothing. She was good as a mean boss but that was it. Do depth and she's given depth to small roles~ see Venus and Atonement. I would not waste my time and was upset to have spent the $5 on this movie...I wanted it back. No returns. Skip the film. It'll only bring you grief...and boredom.

I saw "The Riddle" at the 2007 Austin Film Festival and had a chance to meet the film's writer/director Brendan Foley. I was very impressed by both the film and the director. I would consider the director as one of those rare visionaries who - with a single idea - were able to change a facet of the face of movie marketing and distribution. I find Foley's idea, to distribute the film through a print medium in Europe completely novel and very creative.And yet, that marketing and distribution strategy would mean nothing without an excellent movie and Brendan Foley delivered in that respect as well. I found most of the film's performances very strong and enjoyed seeing Vinnie Jones master a role that is quite atypical for him with ease and to great effect.Foley also managed the difficult task of interweaving the past and present story lines of the highly original plot with eloquence, driving the story forward and keeping the audience on the edge of their seats as the riddle unravels."The Riddle" is well written, shot and edited and highly entertaining. I was very intrigued by the movie. So much, in fact, that I went to see it twice.

The film is very ambitious - probably too ambitious - in that it tries to portray two worlds, one of modern London and one in Victorian London, plus mixing detective thriller and supernatural.Vinnie Jones plays a rough diamond sports hack trying to figure out some murders along the Thames while also investigating the appearance of a previously undiscovered book by Charles Dickens.Vinnie is a likable hero in a Sam Spade sort of way, though it is hard not to wait for him to thump someone in his usual role. In this case he in more bashed than bashing, but his relationship with Julie Cox, playing a police PR, is engaging and he does not seem too phased by rubbing shoulders with Vanessa Redgrave and Sir Derek Jackobi. While Redgrave's role is a rather fleeting cameo, Sir Derek has a double role as a vagrant and as Charles Dickens. I enjoyed the theatricality of his Dickens role, though in the early stages of the movie the hopping from Victorian to modern tended to get in the way of both plots.While the film shows a few signs of being shot on a shoestring and has one foot in 50s B Movie and the other in more mystical territory, the plot and performances are mostly engaging, particularly a scene between the journalist and the tramp in a Thames-side cave.The supporting cast included a lot of familiar TV faces from days gone by - Gareth Hunt from the New Avengers, Mel Smith, PH Moriarty from The Long Good Friday and others, with some good cameos along the way.

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.