2 out of 10
Release Date: Feb 2010 (DVD Premiere)
Director: Brendan Foley (Assault of Darkness)
Cast: Vinnie Jones, Derek Jacobi, Julie Cox, Jason Flemyng, P.H. Moriarty, Mark Assante, Vera Day, Gareth Hunt, Kenny Lynch, Michael Fenton-Stevens, Clemmie Myers with Mel Smith and Vanessa Redgrave
Writer: Brendan Foley
Trailer: THE RIDDLE
Some serious thought has been put into The Riddle‘s mysterious plot but a London set Da Vinci Code this is not (and even that was crapola). Amazingly the plot isn’t the only mysterious element to The Riddle. The casting of Vinnie Jones (X MEN 3) as an investigative journalist also throws up a number of questions. As does the needlessly convoluted and ultra boring plot. A dead girl is found on the shores of the River Thames in central London. An unfinished Charles Dicken‘s novel is also found in the bowels of a London pub. What connects the two? Well Vinnie Jones and his police girlfriend attempt to unravel the muddle. On their way to the truth they encounter a well spoken tramp played with redundant relish by Derek Jacobi (VICIOUS), a hungry pathologist played by the late, great Gareth Hunt (PARTING SHOTS) and a sinister business man with a gun, a cameoing Jason Flemyng (WELCOME TO THE PUNCH). Mel Smith (BABYLON) shows up as a Charles Dicken‘s expert, Kenny Lynch as a gangster?,Derek Jacobi doubles up as Dickens himself, who relates a very boring and overlong story that allegedly drops clues to the present day mystery and Vanessa Redgrave (SONG FOR MARION) swings by for a Vanessa Redgrave-y style cameo as somebody important enough to earn herself the “special guest” tag.
Did I say The Riddle was a plod? Well, yes it’s got more plod than The Bill. Vinnie Jones is thwarted and chased across London by unseen bad guys and slowly edges his way towards a conspiracy that goes all the way to Downing Street. Mooching around London with a rolled up yet priceless Charles Dicken‘s novel asking dumb questions seems to be the way to solve crimes according to the writers, that and employing a white board with funny faces drew up on it. Vinnie Jones must lose the manuscript five times by falshing it around to all and sundry down the pub and even in a nightclub. Friends drop dead or turn into assassins for no reason and the end plot revelation can be seen a mile off, except you are silently pleading with the makers not to make it come to pass, only it does. It’s sad because this is a film with some effort and thought gone into it. But all the goodness has been rinsed off and replaced by good actors acting badly (reverse this for Mr Jones), deadly direction, a sluggish pace, a terrible script and a needlessly convoluted script considering the over simplistic and piss poor denouement.
2 out of 10 – It’s hard to see who this was meant to appeal to. With the presence of a Dickens’ mystery at it’s heart it promises to have a brain. But this is scuppered by just about every element at the makers fingertips. I mean Vinnie Jones as an investigative journalist? Ever heard the one with Charlie Sheen as the President of the USA?
PS: This was given away free two years before it’s commercial debut with the Mail On Sunday in 2007. It’s tag line is “Some Secrets Should Stay Hidden…Forever”… There’s a cheap shot to make about the movie itself here for lesser amateur film critics to make. I’ll take a shortcut and just say “Tis shit squire!”
PPS: Just as randomly as the films casting directors actor compass, I’ll randomly include a link to the amazing Kenny Lynch‘s official website -> KENNY LYNCH’S OFFICIAL WEBSITE
WHAT HAVE I SEEN THAT ACTOR IN BEFORE?
- Vinnie Jones: Redirected, Diamond Heist, Escape Plan, Fire With Fire, Madagacar 3 (voice), The Age Of Dragons, Kill The Irishman, Not Another Not Another Movie, Strength and Honour, Assault of Darkness, The Midnight Meat Train, Garfield 2 (voice), The Condemned, The Other Half, X-Men 3, She’s The Man, EuroTrip, Tooth, The Big Bounce, Mean Machine, Swordfish, Snatch, Gone In 60 Seconds, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
- Derek Jacobi: Cinderella (2015), Effie Gray, Vicious (TV), Last Tango In Halifax (TV), My Week With Marilyn, Anonymous, The King’s Speech, Ironclad, Morris – a Life WIth Bells On, The Golden Compass, Underworld 3, Nanny McPhee, Gosford Park, Gladiator (2000), Love Is The Devil, Hamlet (1996), Dead Again, Henry V (1989), Little Dorrit, The Odessa Files, The Day Of The Jackal
- Julie Cox: The Oxford Murders
- Jason Flemyng: Gemma Bovery, Black Death (2015), Top Dog, Sunshine On Leith, Welcome To The Punch, I Give It a Year, The Great Expectations (2012), Wild Bill (2012), X Men-First Class, Hanna, Solomon Kane, Kick Ass, Ironclad, Jack Falls, Shifty, Clash Of The Titans, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Mirrors, Stardust, Rollin With The Nines, Transporter 2, Layer Cake, Below, Mean Machine, The Bunker, Snatch, Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels,The Red Violin, The Hollow Reed, Deep Rising, Spice World, Alive & Kicking (1996), Deep Rising, Stealing Beauty, The Jungle Book (1994)
- P.H. Moriarty: Evil Never Dies, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Jaws 3, The Long Good Friday, Scum
- Vera Day: Quatermass 2, The Prince & The Showgirl
- Gareth Hunt: Parting Shots, Fierce Creatures, A Chorus Of Disapproval, The New Avengers (TV)
- Mel Smith: Smith & Jones (TV), Twelfth Night (1996), Brain Donors, Wilt, The Wolves Of Willoughby Chase, The Princess Bride, National Lampoon’s European Vacation, Morons From Outer Space, The Kenny Everett Show (TV), Babylon, Not The Nine O’Clock News (TV)
- Vanessa Redgrave: The Butler, Song For Marion, Anonymous, Cars 2 (voice), Animals Utd (voice), Coriolanus, Miral, Atonement, Venus, The White Countess, The Pledge, Girl Interrupted, Cradle Will Rock, Deep Impact, Mrs Dalloway, Wilde, Smilla’s Feeling For Snow, Mission Impossible, A Month By The Lake, Little Odessa, The House Of The Spirits, Howard’s End, Prick Up Your Ears, The Bostonians, Murder On The Orient Express, The Devils, Blow Up, A Man For All Seasons
RISE OF THE ZOMBIE HOOLIGAN FILMS 
THE RIDDLE by Matt Usher aka Joe Pesci II
What would you do if you stumbled upon a manuscript of an unknown work by Charles Dickens? Would you (a) keep it safely in a bank deposit box before entrusting it to a reputable auction house or museum for authentication, or (b) shove it in your pocket, run round town, read bits of it in the pub and then go housebreaking with it still about your person? Guess which course Vinnie Jones takes in THE RIDDLE.
Jones plays a newspaper greyhound racing correspondent. But he’s a keen young turk, eager to prove himself in the bigger, murkier world of reporting on health and safety infringements on building sites. (I’m not making this up.) But he gets taken off the case he’s not on by the newspaper’s editor / owner / whatever she’s meant to be (Vanessa Redgrave). Fortunately for him, murder intervenes in the shape of a dead drowned drug addict! Except he doesn’t notice. Not until murder intervenes for a second time! His old pal, a pub landlady (Vera Day), is discovered one morning by a surfer: in a scene which sums up the whole film we see him emerge from the Thames, walk several metres, and only notice the neatly laid out body when he nearly steps on her.
Who would kill a sweet old riddle-loving pub landlady? Probably the shifty health-and-safety-dodging property developer who’s been trying to redevelop the area and get lots of Olympics money. But that would be too simple! (But it is the answer.) And the riddle-loving landlady left one last riddle for Vinnie Jones to answer. It has nothing to do with her murder, but it does alert him to the hiding place of the Dickens manuscript. So he goes off to find it, aided by a police press officer (Julie Cox) who (a) makes dinner for him (there’s a fabulous montage sequence where she’s cooking and cleaning whilst he gets to work with marker pen and whiteboard and tries to crack the case), (b) apologises to him whenever she’s right and he’s wrong (she even buys him flowers) (sadly she is bamboozled into believing that he has been unfaithful before she can present the bouquet to him), and (c) suddenly provides narrative leads whenever the trail goes cold.
The manuscript Jones finds is titled ‘The Riddle by Charles Dickens’. He is so enthralled reading it that he envisages the story as acted out by Derek Jacobi (playing Dickens). Jacobi has already appeared playing a poetry-reciting tramp enjoying the landlady’s sandwiches, and now he narrates a story of blackmail, madness, misery and adultery. For reasons known only to the director the story’s narrator is shown briefly – a youngish lank-haired man, before being almost immediately superseded by Dickens/Jacobi. The subsequent (unsurprising) big reveal is meant to be: it’s not a fiction, it’s Dickens confessing to murder! This falls flat (well, flatter) because we’ve seen Dickens acting out the protagonist’s role throughout, so when Jones realises the truth the audience has been ahead of him for about an hour.
But he’s a busy lad and is also piecing together the rest of the mystery by doing some rather wonderful legwork. In one scene he hides in a shower whilst a gangster uses the other bathroom facilities. Later he hides behind a filing cabinet in order to ambush a duplicitous secretary. Eventually his dogged determination pays off after he looks in the filing cabinet and the only piece of paper in the first file he picks up proves to have the incriminating evidence he seeks. Then there’s a big shoot-out for no reason other than it’s a Vinnie Jones movie.
There are some plot holes. The baddie causes his own downfall by giving Jones the lead on the health and safety infringements at the start. The landlady dies co-incidentally the day she discovers the manuscript. But the real riddle about THE RIDDLE is what the Dickens does Dickens have to do with anything? (Apart from serving to bump up the running time – the real plot would have been wrapped up in twenty-five minutes in The Bill.) True, Jones works out something very important from reading the manuscript (because the name of the story’s protagonist was an anagram of Charles Dickens this meant a senior police officer was taking bribes – obviously). Even thematically Dickens has little relevance. The first murder, although Thames-related (which is admittedly Dickensian), is more in the Sherlock Holmes tradition (drowning someone in a bath of river-water to make it look like a river-based accident). And then there’s the denouement as we find that the tramp is not a tramp but is in fact… well, I can’t spoil it. Let Vinnie Jones and Derek Jacobi spoil it instead.
And it’s difficult to decide which of those two emerges from this film worse. I think it’s fair to suggest that THE RIDDLE was not written with Vinnie Jones in mind (James McAvoy and Eddie Marsan seem likelier candidates), which suggests he got the role following an excellent audition. I hope my sarcasm is shining brightly here. And yet, he’s not absolutely abysmal. Just very, very bad. He convinces for not one minute as a journalist, but at least no-one expects him to be any good. He gets his words out in the right order and almost looks happy and sad as required. But he exudes no sense of interest, ambition, charisma, spontaneity, tenaciousness, intelligence or urgency. It baffles me that Danny Dyer seems to have the reputation for being our worst leading actor in films whilst Jones is around. But then we come to Derek Jacobi, a fine stage actor whose talent vanishes whenever a film camera hovers into view. Honestly, I’d much rather make fun of Vinnie Jones, but we must, in the interests of fairness, dispense bile everywhere it’s earned. And sadly the performance of Derek Jacobi is one such target. His Dickens is simultaneously under-developed and over the top. He has great fun as the erudite tramp, speaking almost entirely in quotations and cod-Victorian epithets, and he delivers all this entertainingly enough. But there’s no sense of character(s). Whereas Jones seems to treat the script as something to spit out, Jacobi chews on it for all it’s worth. And it’s worth nothing. This is painful over-acting, rendered even worse by the lack of acting from Jacobi’s co-star.
And then there’s Vanessa Redgrave. I guess she didn’t se the script until the cameras were rolling, or maybe she chose to withhold her acting abilities whenever she appeared on screen with Jones (i.e. both her scenes). It’s not that she’s bad, she just seems to have no idea what she’s meant to be doing. Perhaps the director thought ‘Vanessa Redgrave’s a great actress she’ll be great’. Maybe he was spending all his time coaching Jones and forgot to tell Redgrave what to do / who her character was / when she was getting paid?
Amongst the smaller roles we find cult actors a-plenty: Gareth Hunt has fun in a morgue, P H Moriarty is terrible as a 21st century cop and even worse as a 19th century cop (don’t ask), Mel Smith looks embarrassed as a Dickens expert (so dedicated he lives in one of Dickens’ houses), and Vera Day plays the riddle-loving landlady who meets her maker shortly after the Dickensian manuscript falls on her head while she’s making a sandwich for a dodgy builder.
THE RIDDLE has a severe identity problem. On the one hand is the main plot about property development, corruption and murder. Intertwined with that is the story of the ambitious young journalist. Then we have a Sherlock Holmes puzzle. And finally there is the Dickensian intervention which, although taking up most of the film, actually has very little to do with everything else. And then there’s the identity of the audience. The film is aimed at fans of the following: Vinnie Jones, Charles Dickens, Derek Jacobi, whodunits, literary pastiche, gangster films, crime films, the Redgrave acting dynasty, the Daily Mail (the original channel through which this was distributed), London, the Da Vinci Code, and anyone thinking there might be some sort of oblique relationship with Batman. They will all be disappointed if not appalled by this film. Only the fans of Jason Flemyng might have cause to raise half a cheer, as he turns up in more than one scene and gets to do both shooting and dying.