I've seen plenty of bad films in my time, and most of them have been enjoyable in some way, even if only a small one. So when I sat down to watch THE RIDDLE, I had no idea I was about to see one of the most poorly-conceived 'thrillers' of my life, a film that makes television detective series look like Hitchcock. I guess the fact that this film's 'world exclusive premiere' was as a FREEBIE on the front of the Daily Mail might have told me I was in for a rough ride, but even so THE RIDDLE is the pits, you won't see much worse than this.Where to lay the blame? I'd say at every door, pretty much. Director Brendan Foley makes a mess of the whole thing, leading me to suspect that he couldn't 'direct' his way out of a paper bag. The script is poor and the sub-plot involving Charles Dickens narrating a story is boring in the extreme – really, who thought having somebody read a story in scenes interspersed throughout the film would make good cinema? The modern day murder-mystery aspect is a jumbled mess, with no real inclination of who the dead are, why they're dead, and how Vinnie Jones' character has come to investigate. I could barely bring myself to sit through this and, even worse, it lasts for a mind-numbing TWO HOURS. That's two hours of your life you'll never get back, two hours of people talking, eating, occasionally shouting, and drinking in the pub.Obviously what little budget the film-makers had to hand was spent on the cast, because it's astonishingly good for a film of this calibre. Shakespearian actor Derek Jacobi obviously signed up because he got the chance to play Charles Dickens, but he only comes across as a pompous buffoon rather than anyone with weight behind him. Vinnie Jones is an actor I always like, but I was hard pressed to find anything impressive about him here – he's miscast as a journalist and should have stuck to his thuggish roles. There are a couple of attractive actresses in the cast, but they don't have much to work with. Elsewhere we get supporting roles and cameo appearances from the likes of Jason Flemyng (typecast as a bad guy but still the best thing in the movie), a wrinkly Vanessa Redgrave and P. H. Moriarty from The Long Good Friday, who serves to remind us just how GOOD a film shot in London's Docklands can be. Mel Smith's weird appearance is a highlight, if you can call it that.Minor fun can be had from spotting the wealth of errors present: these range from continuity blips (Jones getting the back of his shirt soaked, then, hey presto!, it's clean in the next scene) to more serious factual mistakes (Dickens in his house with modern-day radiators). But in the end, THE RIDDLE is an utterly boring, stupid film, a cheap cash-in on the success of THE DA VINCI CODE, and one to be avoided like the plague.

THE RIDDLE was written and directed by Brendan Foley in what appears to be an attempt to pull the mysteries of the Charles Dickens' novels into a contemporary story, but that attempt is thwarted by electing to use the two periods of time format in which the 'riddle' is unraveled. Despite a cast of well-known actors, trying their best to pull off this direct to DVD movie, the end product is a long, tedious, amateurish mess that can only be considered as entertainment if viewers are fans of the cast as remembered from other films. Mike Sullivan (Vinnie Jones) is a journalist confined to reporting on dog racing events while he dreams of important reporting assignments. A series of similar murders happens to include an old friend of Mike's - Sadie (Vera Day) who runs a pub on the banks of the Thames, having just discovered an old valuable unpublished manuscript by Charles Dickens, and has a heart of gold, giving sandwiches away to such pathetic creatures as an old tramp beachcomber (Derek Jacobi). Sadie's murder attracts Mike to the role of detective journalism and with the help of policewoman Kate (Julie Cox) he begins to tie the investigation to clues he finds in reading the Dickens manuscript. Disrupting the flow of this rather simplistic story is the use of flashbacks to Dickens' time as Dickens (again Derek Jacobi) narrates a rather personal story of peculiar murders. The parallel between stories and the cross casting among actors may have worked in another's hands, but the finessing of this kind of venture escapes writer/director Brendan Foley. He draws his story to a close (at long last) with a tired Hollywoodesque ending. In addition to Jones, Jacobi, Cox, and Day, the film somehow attracted the attention of Vanessa Redgrave, Jason Flemyng, PH Moriarty and Mel Smith: their contributions are minimal but happily distracting. This is a flimsy bit of treacle leaving the viewer wondering how films of this quality ever find funding. Grady Harp

As I'm listening to my parents watch this (after I gave up 10 minutes into the film), they have absolutely no idea what is going on. When "Charles Dickens" stared into the camera, I half expected him to turn into a demon (yes, he looked like one). Unfortunately, that didn't happen.This movie had various reasons I did not finish it: one, it was unbearably slow. I mean, seriously, it was SLOWW. You can only understand 10% of what is said, and the characters were poorly introduced.If you have an English accent and you like a LOTTT of talking, no action, terrible acting, cheesy laughs, and the same music/sound effects played over and over and over, then this is THE movie for you...1/10 - completely horrible.Avoid at all costs.

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.