Rated: UR (But probably PG-13)
Running Time: 116 Minutes
Year: 2007
Boobs: Zero
One Sentence: Charles Dickens loves a good riddle.
The Riddle, stars Vinnie Jones as a reporter, who has to help figure out why his older lady friend who runs a pub suddendly gets murdered after she leaves a Riddle on his answering machine, which leads him to find an unpublished work from Charles Dickens, then it gets weird. I am not joking, this is the plot of this movie. It is totally wild.
The Riddle, comes off sounding really good, and that it could be smart, twisty and really fun. However to be those things, you really got to stick the twisty story, and the whole thing has to come together really well. This was not one of those movies. In the end I was let down and confused by a few of the parts of this complex story, that I think went in a few too many directions. There are present day scenes, there are scenes from the past with Charles Dickens narration (my favorite parts of the movie) and this story that spans all of that time, and attempts to link those two time lines, which I think it did not successfully do.
The plot was sloppy, the editing was equally as sloppy, and I just didn't get why we were chasing certain things, that at the end of the movie didn't really matter. The resolution was not satisfying and I didn't feel like it was a movie where I was given the clues to figure this out myself. The actors were ok, and Derek Jacobi who played Charles Dickens I thought did an excellent job, but that wasn't enough to save the movie from it's mixed up goal.
