Relentlessly grim

Rating: 4/10 (28 August 2018)

"Child 44" has a stellar cast and a classic premise: A tough, gritty cop on the hunt for a gruesome serial child killer. The twist is that the "cop" is a Stalin-era MGB agent, Leo (Tom Hardy). He's a former orphan who became a war hero, and now lives in a spacious apartment with his beautiful schoolteacher wife, Raisa (Noomi Rapace). The plot, based on an award-winning novel, is convoluted, but mainly hinges on Leo's growing interest in a mysterious string of deaths of young boys, and his dogged determination to crack the case as his privileged status in the Soviet hierarchy unravels. Yet the film is weighed down by too many side plots, and hits you over the head with endless examples of how horrible it was to live under the Stalin regime.
"Child 44" is a relentlessly grim movie, with heaps of gratuitous violence (even when it doesn't really advance the story). Many of the scenes are dimly lit, everything colored in browns and grays. Leo and Raisa have a strange, uneven relationship, and it's very hard to grasp her motivation for doing anything she does in this film, other than that she was living in a constant state of fear because she's in a totalitarian state. Her character makes no sense, even though she's in most of the scenes. A waste of a great actress like Rapace (the original "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo").
The serial killer plot feels stale. "Child 44" seems less focused on the mystery solving and more on all the suspicion, backstabbing, blackmail, ratting out on your friends, police state brutality and bureaucratic oppression of the old USSR. I love Tom Hardy, and he does infuse his portrayal of Leo with pathos, longing, pain and gritty determination to do the right thing in a corrupt system. But this film's script and direction are just muddled.
Kids, if you want to watch a far superior, engaging movie with a similar premise, opt for "Gorky Park" instead. Sorry! With some of my favorite actors in the cast, I wanted to like this more than I did.