Could've been so much more...

Rating: 6/10 (11 May 2015)

When you see the impressive trailer, you start thinking Child 44 could be a really good film. Not just a nice thriller, but an impressive commentary on the Soviet Union in the '50s. The presence of Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Noomi Rapace, Charles Dance and Vincent Cassell only serve to bolster the notion that Child 44 could be something special. Unfortunately, the film fails to deliver on these fronts. Simple as that.
Leo Demidov is an assumedly pro-Stalin security officer whose job is to hunt down traitors, a bit like a non-deranged version of Hans Landa. A recurring tagline is that there's no murder in paradise. Indeed, such is Stalin's influence on his people that murder isn't even considered a possibility. Instead, if such a thing were to occur, it could only have been instigated by westerners. When the son of a friend of Leo's is found dead, Leo is told to hand them a report stating it was a tragic accident, but the father won't have it. He pleads with Leo to believe him, stating there was a witness who saw the boy walk away with a man. Eventually, after a nasty bit of intrigue, Leo is demoted and relocated to another city that seems to resemble Mordor. After more and more children are found dead under similar circumstances, he finds himself obsessed with solving the case, while mostly everyone's more willing to sweep it under the rug for fear of the inevitable repercussions.
In a nutshell, Child 44 suffers not so much from pacing issues as too many story lines all competing for attention. The identity of the serial killer is the big mystery, that is until his identity is revealed midway and he loses all potency. From that point on, you're just awaiting his inevitable ending monologue where he explains why he does what he does and why he 'just can't help it.' There's also Leo and Raisa's troubled marriage which is less than ideal. Over the course of the film, they grow closer as they attempt to catch the serial killer. There's also the matter of Leo's colleague, another antagonist who feels constantly belittled by Leo and seizes his chances for revenge when Leo is demoted and he's promoted. While interesting at first, he soon becomes little more than a typical bad guy whose only real function is to drop dead at the end. There's also Gen. Nesterov (Oldman) who has his own little subplot before being almost entirely written out of the rest of the proceedings.
I could go on. As a thriller, Child 44 does enough things right. The acting is pretty good and there are quite a few tense action scenes that are unfortunately only hampered by a severe case of Shaky Cam. I'm not usually the first to complain about this familiar modern trope, but here it's pretty bad. There's a fight in the mud where the combatants naturally become smeared with mud. This, combined with the shaky cam, makes it literally impossible to see who's winning, Undercut no. 1 or Undercut no. 2.
But in the end it feels like Child 44 aims to be so much more with its commentary on various facets of the Stalinist regime, but so little actually works. Whether it's the various subplots, the abandoned subplots, the lackluster attention devoted to character development, the over-the-top bad guy colleague, or even the occasionally distracting Russian accents, there's always something preventing you from losing yourself in the story. Decent, but could've been so much more.