Child 44

directed by:
Daniel Espinosa
starring:
Tom Hardy; Noomi Rapace; Fares Fares; Joel Kinnaman; Gary Oldman; Paddy
Considine

“The common thread is Leo Demidov (Tom Hardy); orphaned as a child by
the Ukrainian famine in 1933, he found a home in the army and raised
the Soviet flag over Berlin in 1945. By 1953, he is married to the
lovely Raisa (Noomi Rapace) and hunting down traitors for the MGB with
old army comrades Alexei (Fares Fares) and Vasili (Joel Kinnaman).
Alexei’s son being murdered but the official finding being a tragic
accident – there are no murders in the workers’ paradise – is not what
gets Leo demoted and exiled to the backwater of Volsk, but once there,
he discovers a similar crime. Hopefully General Mikhail Nesterov (Gary
Oldman), the head of the local militia, will be more willing to
investigate than the brass back in Moscow was.

“CHILD 44 does not exactly start slow, but it does spend enough time
establishing Leo as the relatively humane member of the secret police
(along with other things) that the audience can find themselves in the
uncomfortable position of becoming impatient for the first kid to die.
Unfortunately, that half of the film never really takes off; though
early scenes are framed so as to imply that the killer’s identity is an
important mystery, what’s actually going on is only vaguely sketched
out, and Paddy Considine is wasted in his too-small role.

“On the other side, it’s a slow build, but it at least gets somewhere
interesting. What initially seems like the sort of background that
could be seen as artificially softening Leo plays out in more
intriguing fashion; as the film goes on, it becomes a sort of tragedy
that Leo would, all things being equal, probably prefer to be a cop
than anything else, but the society he’s in perverts that job into a
means of controlling the citizenry while actually trying to solve a
crime – even one unconnected to politics – will make him an outlaw.
It’s a similarly long, bumpy road to follow what’s going on between Leo
and Raisa, though it becomes worthwhile to get an intimate look at just
how being adjacent to the sort of work he does can affect those
involved.

“It also puts the focus on Tom Hardy and Noomi Rapace, which is always
welcome. Though there’s something a bit grandiose about the accent
Hardy puts on as Leo, he manages to build both a fierceness and
sincerity around a character who logically can’t be as naive as he
sometimes seems. Rapace has to work with a lighter touch, but she
manages it, creating a nervous but strong and pragmatic complement.
None of the rest of the cast has roles of the same quality; Joel
Kinnaman makes an able thug while Fares Fares is warm, and Gary Oldman
certainly seems to deserve a bit more than he’s given here.

“They’re plopped in the middle of an impressive-looking film; from the
battle scene in Berlin to Moscow to Volsk, the film is meticulously
constructed to the last detail. It’s not a particularly action-packed
film, but when that is called for, Daniel Espinosa presents it in
clear, exciting fashion, even if eventually literally dragging the
characters into a patch of mud is a bit on the nose. The whole thing
does feel like it could pick up the pace somewhat – though there are
impressive parts, it takes a while to get going and the investigation
itself is never as fascinating as one hopes.

“Just cutting a half hour out of a long movie wouldn’t do it; CHILD 44
needs more. As a crime story, it leans too heavily on being in an
unusual setting without making use of it; and while it’s better as a
story of trying to have integrity in a corrupt system, there’s room for
improvement there, too. Enough elements of both are done well to make
the movie interesting, but probably not enough to pique much interest
in the detective series that the end goes out of its way to set up. 3 cats

“Seen 19 April 2015 in AMC Boston Common #9 (first-run, DCP)”