2/10

Rating: 2/10 (30 April 2015)

An atrocious and disappointing experience, a bore from frame one to the very last, a real lesson on how not to make a movie. This comes from someone that has been on the Tom Hardy train before it even existed, I have been saying ever since last April that he deserved to win the best actor Oscar for "Locke". Same thing for Gary Oldman, I am a maniac of his work as an actor. But not even my love for these two actors could save the waste of time "Child 44" was.
I do not ever give "1s" or "2s", It really has to be a wreck for me to go that low, yet that's what this film is. There aren't really any positives I can talk about with the exception that Hardy, Considine and Oldman are genuinely watchable. I generally give "4s" or "3s" to movies I hate because despite the fact that I totally disliked them I found that my seat didn't get uncomfortable. But man, this is a whole other level of bad. I despised this film. Espinosa goes deep into taking every possible wrong choice and leaves you wondering what the heck was he thinking when he put this together in the editing room? There must have been embarrassing silence in there for the whole process. This film looks like the product of amateurs. I am surprised that someone like Pietro Scalia edited this film together, he is actually a great editor. Yet here he was probably editing while being drunk. The cinematography definitely doesn't help. Calling it horrible would be a favor. There is some of the worst cinematography and lighting I have ever seen in my life and I wonder how the FU*K did this make it to a professional level. From the second scene in the movie you take it that you won't ever understand what is going on in an action sequence because the shaky cam is preposterous, but man not even understanding what's going on in a dialogue scene?? How is that even possible, you managed to mess up fu**king dialogue scenes?? The photography of this film is so bad my eyes were hurting 20 minutes in. How the hell do you go from shooting the masterpiece that "The Bourne Ultimatum" is to shooting this incomprehensible chaos? Joel Kinnaman gives another irritatingly bad performance. Don't get me even started on screenplay, story coherence or character development because there isn't any single one of those elements present in the film.
I could go on ranting about "Child 44" for pages, but it isn't even worth it. It is a disgraceful filmaking effort that does not deserve nor the money nor the time I dedicated to it, probably one of the worst things I have seen since I started reviewing films.