Child 44
Set in Stalin-era Soviet Union, a disgraced MGB agent is dispatched to investigate a series of child murders -- a case that begins to connect with the very top of party leadership.
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- Cast:
- Tom Hardy , Gary Oldman , Noomi Rapace , Fares Fares , Joel Kinnaman , Paddy Considine , Jason Clarke
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Reviews
Why so much hype?
Brilliant and touching
A Masterpiece!
All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.
This movie is great. An excelent drama thriller with some investigation elements. It makes you care about the main characters and despise the whole time period and location they live in. You're always rooting for them and thrilled until the very end.Minor complaints are pretty much pet peeves of mine. For example, I'm not sure about the criminal's intentions. I think it was left way to open or I didn't even get it at all.Great movie.
What a bizarrely dull waste. The successful Child 44 book had three or four things going for it: a stunningly atmospheric opening in a winter of starvation (here rushed over and its relevance weakened), a big reveal (cut), the evolving relationship between Demidov and his wife as they first realize the emptiness of what they thought they had and then build anew (next to Noomi Rapace's pained wisdom Tom Hardy's Leo is a nice picture of inarticulate bewildered loyalty, war hero as premiership footballer out of his depth, but it doesn't go anywhere) and a reasonable cat-and-mouse/chase plot. Trying to squeeze in most of the narrative of the book, but still dropping a couple of significant facts and incidents, the film manages somehow to be both too long and too rushed. The Demidovs hurry back and forth across Russia having unpleasant train incidents, the commuter experience from hell, and then the mystery gets addressed in a couple of brisk and largely unrelated bits of business at the end. Espinosa worthily films most of the book, but loses its sense and its drama. Child 44 has some vivid styling and performances (largely for decoration – Cassel is intimidating because he's Cassel, nothing more; Oldman has to resort to maximum shouting-and-spitting to get any drama into his scenes; Dance, as so often, is paraded as a token of film gravity), but it's otherwise as empty and lifeless as its Siberian wilderness.The Script Hack (https://thescripthack.wordpress.com/): if we're skipping the plot relevance of the starvation opening, we can skip the whole scene; if we're dropping the key bits of information gained from the mid-story return to Moscow, we can drop that whole sequence; and we could trim some of the secondary scenes (the last, for example, nicely true to the book, could be 30 seconds instead of five minutes). That would create much more time and space to pace and build the mystery and anticipation and drama of the hunt, and the relationships at its heart, and still leave a tighter more powerful film.
A good story totally ruined by a bad director. Great actors have been degraded thanks to Espinosa. English with Russian accent was and always is a terrible idea, especially when you choose the actors that have problems with performance in this made-up-dialect. The story is also misleading the audience a few times in the film making 3-4 stories in the same film, jumping from one to another, with a poor or no explanation in a single part of the movie. At the end I was confused, didn't know how to connect the events into the plot. At first seemed we search for a murders done by Soviet system, then ups!-it's not, there is somebody, a single killer, but seems protected by government (why?who knows!), then we have some stupid short story about drugged nazidivisions which are inserted into the Soviet-system to revenge their defeat in war. At the end- No,again! It is all about a sick ex-soviet officer from the WW2 who is crying at the end end being shot just 2 minutes after showing up in the movie. The movie has been directed as there was a small child behind the scene, not a grown up. TERRIBLE! I give 4/10 just for a good actors team gathered, even their performance was poor, but again thanks to Espinosa.
So this is how Russia was like during the days of the USSR, just absolutely horrible all with a broken law system and having absolutely no freedom.The film itself was too awfully depressing and sad in a grim way, all this just made the film incredibly dull. There was absolutely no sense of nice things to come, just more bad news and the story was far too incredibly hard and confusing to follow.I just didn't like this film despite this film having good talented actors like Gary Oldman. Most of the film was simply too boring and uninteresting.I would seriously recommend everyone to avoid this film, a film this boring and hard to follow is not worth watching.