It's like I really do want it I think that Tom hardy is a decent actor, but please someone tell him he doesn't need to put on a stupid accent in EVERY single film, overact and ruin it! Apart from that, this could have been really good. But the pace, script, acting and , well, everything, was just so slow, dull and after an hour wasn't going anywhere so had to give up.

A serial murderer is at large in Stalinist USSR (1945). The victims are young boys. That is the background to what is really an attack on Stalinist tactics. We don't see much of the crime or even the investigation. Mostly we see a Western take on Soviet suppression. Don't get me wrong, Stalin was a mass murderer on a historic scale, and deserves vilification. But his minions were individuals. "Child 44" doesn't recognize such complexity. Instead, it reduces almost every character to good or evil. The exception is Raisa (Noomi Rapace in a beautiful performance), the wife of a captain in Soviet intelligence, Leo Demidov (Tom Hardy, in what may be his best performance to date). The arc of the story takes her from feeling forced into a marriage to a powerful gendarme to the dawning realization that Leo is a good man struggling with his brutal role and reputation in society.Ultimately, the two principal bad guys-- the child murderer (Paddy Considine) and Leo's colleague and nemesis (Joel Kinnaman)-- are nothing more than plot devices to deliver scenes of brutality, including a protracted beating of Leo. I saw the film streaming on TV, so I could fast-forward through scenes that made me suspect sadistic tendencies in the director, Daniel Espinosa. The only other film of his that I saw, "Safe House," showed the same tendencies ( and his 2017 movie "Life" has no shortage of pain and gore, according to reviews I read.) I'm not squeamish; there is a place for violence in cinema. But Espinosa indulged in it well beyond the needs of the story. The running time of 137 minutes is a tell. And the power of the story is not about the Soviet purges and gulags, where violence occurred. The story, at its heart, is about one spouse finding the true moral character in another-- a wife learning to trust her husband's love, and coming to love him in return. It's too bad such sensitivity didn't inform all the characters in the story, or spare the audience the excessive bloodthirst.

Set in Stalin's post-war Soviet Union, this story of serial child killings runs parallel with that of the strained relations between Hardy and Rapace's lead characters, Leo and Raisa. In Moscow, the discovery of a friend's son's body and the state's denial of such crimes and subsequent cover up provoke something in Leo. He uses his powers as a senior Soviet police officer to pursue the perpetrator, against orders. This, combined with an embarrassing clash with a fellow comrade sees him stripped of rank and dispatched to a dystopian, remote industrial town as punishment. Dismissed from her teaching job, Raisa goes with him. As forces conspire against Leo, they must make a stand together. So, a different town but yet, another murder. What is their connection? Desperate to find answers, especially for his friend, Leo must persuade the local police chief that there is a connection between here and Moscow, where his case started. This film depicts the daily grind and harshness endured by the Soviet people together with the political paranoia prevalent during this era. All of this portrayed convincingly by a quality cast.

This movie was fractally inept, from the smallest detail to the biggest concept. The script and director must think its an accomplishment to keep the audience confused. No, confusion is the natural human condition. What is rare is clarity. I despised this movie from the beginning, when it was obvious that they used the Law and Order: Criminal Intent opening. This is where you string as many completely unrelated vignettes together because you are too incompetent to tell a story. Lets torture the audience, like some teen-tease. I remember checking the progress bar at 18 minutes, thinking that at least the movie had begun. I was wrong, it was more like three movies.While USSR was no paradise in 1953, I have to believe the portrait painted by the book author of total repression represented his homosexual orientation. Yeah, USSR was probably pretty repressive if you were gay. That is wrong and bad, but don't portray every aspect of society as that repressive to everyone from farmers to MGB officers. As the Russian commentator noted here, even by 1953 the USSR was getting less totalitarian. Stalin died in 1953.The movie was like a dramatization of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood but mixed in with portraits of Waco, Ruby Ridge, the McCarthy hearings, and the Mi Lai massacre. Its as if the movie cherry-picked every horror and excess of the USSR and then painted it as everyday life.Confusion. Boy oh boy will you be confused. There is a reviewers here that thinks Gary Oldman was the father that adopted Tom Hardy. Another does not think the assassinated farmers were hiding the political prisoner. I have never watched a movie where the editing was so inept that I would be expecting the resolution of some vignette, and pop, I was in a completely different place with different characters maybe at a different place in the timeline. This may have been because the self-indulgent director shot a 4-hour movie and the editor had to smoosh it into a still-too-long 2 hours and 17 minutes.And the director delights in confusion. Hey, lets have the big mano-a-mano climax be mud wrestling where we can't tell anybody apart. And lets use a lot of Jason Bourne shaky-cam so it is really impossible to know what is going on. Its just the feelings we convey, to show all the characters are confused too. Watch the director commentary of Amadeus where Milos Forman agonizes if his opening scene is clear enough for the audience to know what is going on.In addition to the incompetent editing and script and direction, the fake accents do grate a little. Otherwise the actors were A-list, as you would expect. That fakeness was not helped by wild implausibility. Even in 1953 USSR, heck, especially in 1953 USSR, does anyone really think a mid-level MGB officer can shoot a subordinate in the back, in his office no-less? I know the book author hated the USSR, but do we really believe that the law enforcement apparatus would suppress murders because its the hallmark of an "imperfect society? Read the Wikipedia entry on Andrei Chikatilo, the real serial killer this movie appropriates. The Russians had 15 prosecutors and 29 detectives on the case. The investigation did implicate innocent people, but that happens in the US every single day. The investigation also solved 1000 unrelated crimes, including rapes and murders. Sure, you could say that was in 1985 USSR, but its not like the 1950s could have been that much different in the attitude towards crime.Another major implausibility is the relationship to the wife. She loves you, she hates you, she cons you, she betrays you, she stands by you. Its like being married to the Magic 8-Ball. You never know what's going to turn up. Sorry, not based on any reality I have ever seen. Sneaky snarky scumbags stay that way. Oh, and back to confusion, how about when Hardy shows up at some parent's apartment. I thought they were her parents, since, ta da, he was an orphan. But no, the Amazing Kreskin tapped us on the forehead and with no warning or foreshadowing, we are expected to know they are his adoptive parents.The main conflict here is really office politics. Spy agencies are full of passive-aggressives. they don't go around shooting each other or defenseless Kulaks at the drop of a hat.Sadly there is no way to fix this mess. Its what economists call a dead-weight loss. You could give the book to the Russians that made Stalingrad (1990), and even they could not coax a good believable story out of this.OK, who can resist? First, when writing about a mass murderer and serial killer, lets make the main conflict being with him (or her if you want an Oscar). Sure keep it in 1953 USSR, but factually show the hope for the future and changes as Stalin dies. Rather than some goofy spy agency fallen angel, lets have it be a prosecutor, like actually happened in real-life. Lets have Hardy be glad that the totalitarian state is in decline, but the only way he gets closer to solving the crime is by going all Andy Sipowicz NYPD Blue on the suspects. This will let us wonder why humans always resort to violence and repression to get what we really really want.A nice art-house film disguised as a police procedural. The society gets less repressive as the hero gets more repressive. The crazy killer goes down, so how do we really feel about that? Easy 85 million domestic gross, with great foreign box office. There will always be the action figures and product placements to make this a real home run. People that read the book will be appalled, but there are so few of them, it really does not matter.