The medium is presumably meant to be the message in this drama about Julian Assange, which seeks to do for Wikileaks what The Social Network did for Facebook. It's visually kinetic to fault, cramming and cluttering the screen with computer graphics, including diagrams that look like flight maps.
It doesn't want you to forget that it's a drama about How Information Spreads. Data makes for dry drama, of course (the actors sometimes seem to spend more time opening and closing laptops than talking) but in an age where primary school kids file-share on smartphones, it seems slightly literal-minded, particularly as it opens with a montage of the history of news reminding us that chiselled stone tablets and papyrus scrolls were the real precursors of the internet.
One of the few things no one needs to be told about Assange and Wikileaks is that they placed classified information in the public domain. The success of a project of this kind must be measured by what it does next and the answer here is "not a lot". Much of the film's action is actually re-enactment of material that anyone with an interest and an internet connection has seen dozens of times.
In sharp contract to his work as writer-director of Gods and Monsters, in which Ian McKellen played Frankenstein director James Whale, Condon struggles to create plausible human beings out of the characters who people this film. Token hints about a troubled childhood just don't cut it As a result, Cumberbatch's impersonation of Assange, eerily accurate but for an uneasy Aussie drawl that sometimes makes him sound like a stroke victim, becomes an object of marvel in its own right rather than a means to something larger.
