Sowiet Union Not Havink Serial Killer!

Rating: 3/10 (10 January 2016)

A flawed film, more or less based on the case of Chikotilo, the notorious serial killer who notched up several dozen children, some after terrible torture.
It's interesting to compare the HBO docudrama, "Citizen X", with this fictional feature film. The first was measured in its pace and splendidly acted by the droopy faced Steven Rhea and his superior, Donald Sutherland. It stuck closely to the historical facts as documented in the well-informed case study, "The Killer Department," by Robert Cullen. The dissolution of the dilatory and obstructionist USSR is clearly shown but with some subtlety.
In my review I described "Citizen X" as a serial killer movie made for adults. "Child 44" isn't without its moments. It's well-directed and the performance's are adequate, with Tom Hardy's relentless investigator and Joel Kinnaman as the handsome and utterly ruthless NKVD operator outstanding.
Yet "Child 44" can't be described as a serial killer movie for adults. It's been alloyed with the current taste for darkness and bone-crushing violence.
The plot is what the real participants might have called "gloopy." There is some wild crap introduced showing that the killer spent time in a Nazi prison where he was injected with a serum -- or let's call it a potient -- that rendered him hungry for human flesh. Where did such an explanation come from? Whose was the hand that slanted back that brow? The whole movie is overwrought and lacks verisimilitude. Tom Hardy gets his brains beaten out and two minutes later he's clobbering three bald, armed NKVD goons, each the size of Boulder Dam.
Part of the story has been turned into domestic drama. I don't mind a come-and-go romance being in the story. In "Citizen X", the investigator had his plump Russian zhbena, but here he has a lengthy, twisted relationship with his wife who is not (thank Bog) a stunning and glamorous modelesque type.
The film shows the USSR to be a dark, dreary, threatening place. Every scene seems to be filled with grimy warehouses and pipes. It's so ashen that it brings to mind Fitzgerald's phantasmal description of the city of ashes in "Gatsby." There's never a ray of sunshine.
It's very plainly anti-Russian propaganda. We will never get over the Cold War, it seems. But, like "Citizen X", it does capture the demeaning nature of communism. You're assigned to a particular apartment, for instance, and in both films people are eager to get a larger and more comfortable place to live. What a shabby existence. No wonder it finally fell apart. It ought to give us pause when we call an American public figure a "communist." Nobody wants that.