Grim slog in search for direction
Print Edition
THE best-selling novel “Child 44” by Tom Rob Smith runs well over 400 pages, and that’s perhaps the first hint as to why the movie based on it seems to veer in 40 different directions.
It’s a political movie. It’s a war film. It’s a crime thriller. And suddenly, late in the proceedings, it becomes an action movie. At 137 minutes, the movie’s also a good half-hour too long. It’s as if director Daniel Espinosa and screenwriter Richard Price felt the need to include something from each of the book’s pages.
What we have left is a bloated, grim, underwhelming affair, which is unfortunate as the movie starts out with a lot going for it. Besides the popular source material and compelling backdrop of fear in the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin, the film has an excellent cast starring the always interesting Tom Hardy as a self-questioning military hero, intelligence operative and amateur gumshoe.
After a sad prologue from his boyhood, we meet Leo Demidov (Hardy, sporting a very thick Russian accent) in World War II Berlin, where he becomes an accidental hero by virtue of being the one to raise his country’s flag above the Reichstag. We then jump to 1953; Demidov is an officer in the MGB, the Soviet intelligence agency (and KGB forerunner).
Things turn difficult for Demidov when his MGB boss, Kuzman (Vincent Cassel) orders him to investigate his own wife, Raisa (a sensitive Noomi Rapace).
At the same time, Demidov has hit on something disturbing: The young son of a colleague has been killed by the train tracks. Demidov knows from seeing the body — naked, and sliced up — that the boy was murdered, but he’s ordered to tell the family it was a train accident. Why? Because in Stalin’s worker’s paradise, murder doesn’t exist; it only exists in decadent capitalist societies.
Demidov doesn’t have time to investigate further in Moscow because, having refused to denounce his own wife, he’s exiled along with Raisa to a far-off outpost, where he’s given an unglamorous job under a mercurial boss.
But boys keep getting killed by train tracks — this is where the number 44 comes from — and Demidov is determined to track down the killer, returning to Moscow to investigate on the sly.
We won’t expose the ending, though fans of the book know that “Child 44” is the first in a trilogy. Should the filmmakers pursue the other installments, they’ll hopefully leave more on the cutting room floor.
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