Child 44 (2015) Review!!

Synopsis – A disgraced member of the military police investigates a series of nasty child murders during the Stalin-era Soviet Union.

My Take – I love serial killer movies as well as political thrillers!! As a result when you see in an impressive trailer which is supposed to cover both genres, not to mention the impressive cast of the film, your expectations are bound to sky rocket!! But as is in the case of many films now days, it tries to do cover so many aspects in a run time of about 137 minutes, it ends up becoming a convoluted mess, which is not here or even there. This film fails to deliver on all fronts. Simple as that! The story follows a a starving, desperate boy escaping from a Ukrainian orphanage in the early 1930s during the great famine which ultimately killed millions in Ukraine. Joseph Stalin was responsible for the systematic deportations and murders of prominent Ukrainians in order to force them to give up their independent farms and adopt collectivization on state-controlled collective farms. The boy is rescued by Soviet troops and adopted by a Russian officer, who renames him Leo. He becomes Leo Demidov (Tom Hardy). And the next scene we see him and his wartime buddy, Alexei Andreyev (Fares Fares), storming the German Reichstag in Berlin and hoisting the bright red Soviet flag flapping in the wind on the roof of the Reichstag, showing to what was left of the battered German forces that the Soviets had taken their capital, Berlin.* This was on 2 May 1945 and the photo taken of this event became as symbolic in the Soviet Union as the photo of the four US Marines hoisting the flag on Iwo Jima. The war in Europe ended May 8 with the unconditional surrender of Germany to the Allied Forces of the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. There are no murders in paradise. Paradise being the Soviet Union, which was considered a paradise for the workers. So, there could be no murders committed there by loyal Soviet citizens.

Any murder was considered the work of capitalist spies who were out to destroy the Soviet Union. We now see Leo Demidov in 1953 where he is a high-level MGB investigator who has been smitten with Raisa (Noomi Rapace) and soon they are married, although we learn later her motive for marriage was far different from what Leo could ever have imagined. We see Leo at work tracking down people believed to be spies against the Soviet Union. We see torture and killings. We see mass arrests and harassment of ordinary Soviet citizens by MGB police. In the midst of all this Alexei’s son is brutally murdered! Eventually, after a nasty bit of intrigue, Leo is demoted and relocated to another city that seems to resemble Mordor (from Lord of the Rings series). After more and more children are found dead under similar circumstances, he finds himself obsessed with solving the case, while mostly everyone’s more willing to sweep it under the rug for fear of the inevitable repercussions. In a nutshell, the film suffers not so much from pacing issues as too many story lines all competing for attention. The identity of the serial killer is the big mystery, that is until his identity is revealed midway and he loses all potency. From that point on, you’re just awaiting his inevitable ending monologue where he explains why he does & what he does’ There’s also Leo and Raisa’s troubled marriage which is less than ideal. Over the course of the film, they grow closer as they attempt to catch the serial killer. There’s also the matter of Leo’s colleague, another antagonist who feels constantly belittled by Leo and seizes his chances for revenge when Leo is demoted and he’s promoted. While interesting at first, he soon becomes little more than a typical bad guy with an inevitable end. There’s also Gen. Nesterov (Gary Oldman) who has his own little subplot before being almost entirely written out of the rest of the proceedings. What pulled the film down was its directing most of all, many of fight scenes were done in a poorly executed shaky cam which made it impossible to tel who was shooting or hitting who. This was made further difficult by the final scene with the fight in the mud, that you could tell which was was Tom Hardy. This makes the film completely fail as an action movie, especially when some of the stunt work is laughable. There’s a scene where a guy of average build and fairly short stature throws Tom Hardy over his head like he was throwing a sleeping bag; you can just imagine the audience reaction. The poor directing was further evident with an overly long running, and after a 2 hour wait to see the killer, the last 15 minutes roughly are very rushed and full of plot holes including the Russian soldiers finding Tom Hardy and Noomi Rapace in the forest at the end after not being in Moscow in the shot before.

Furthermore, the dodgy Russian accents take the realism of the film away and the film doesn’t capture the true brutality in Stalin’s Russia which could of been explored. The titular murder of 44 children makes up the B-plot of the movie. The serial killer’s character is never developed or even properly characterized, the moment he actually comes face-to-face with Leo, the film just drops him & instead replaces him with Joel Kinnaman’s Vasili, who is by far the most predictable & unlikable antagonist I’ve seen in a while. His only reason to be nasty to Leo is at the beginning of the film, Leo and his gang (which Vasili’s) part of, try and find a fugitive (Jason Clarke), and after the aforementioned fight scene where Leo is chucked around, Vasili shoots the owners of the farm (who were not even helping the fugitive in the 1st place) in front of their children, so Leo punches him and calls him a prick. Following this, he goes to insane levels to get back at him, including having him shamed and expelled from the secret police, trying to force his wife to sleep with him, killing and terrorizing his friends. However, Tom Hardy’s performance deserves a standing ovation. Possibly one of my favorite recent performances of his, he sells his character “Leo Demidov’s” inner struggle and conflicting emotions excellently, nailing the Russian accent as well. Apart from Hardy, Naomi Rapace also does a great job at conveying her own personal struggle. Joel Kinnaman is let down by his poor character sketch of antagonist that does not have much range other than being cliched. Gary Oldman is hardly there. On the whole, ‘Child 44’, fails to to deliver on many levels. The plot lost its real intrigue after about 30 minutes, and for a murder, mystery set in this era their was no clear build up of suspense, or a real pay off for the slow paced plot. The complete failure of this film is the script. Even at 2 hours 17 minutes, it does not come close to fitting anything in well, with the poorly characterized characters other than Leo and Raisa, the insulting motives of the child murderer & the bad pacing, the film get caught up in its own confusion.