Almost perfect...

Rating: 9/10 (9 March 2017)

Let me begin with a confession: As far as I know I am heterosexual, but I have a very non-heterosexual fixation on Tom Hardy. And Idris Elba. And Carey Price. And Benedict Cumberbatch... But most of all, on Tom Hardy, particularly of late. Since I first discovered him... (That's right, I discovered him. At least that's how it works in my mind...) In the film Warrior, which I and a few friends only went to see as a kind of joke. I mean, none of us was expecting a movie around Mixed Martial Arts to actually be any good, and none of us had ever heard of the two leads, Hardy and Joel Edgerton. (Oh, yeah, him too...) So we were expecting it to be awful in that way that you can sarcastically make fun of for years to come. I have an extensive background in boxing and Mixed Martial Arts, so I was expecting to find that amusing and worthy of ridicule as well. (Since then there has been the brilliant television series, Kingdom and the hilarious Here Comes the Boom, so apparently you can make good things around MMA.) We were all particularly shocked by the intense and powerful performance of Tom Hardy. Of course we all assumed he had to be American and must be an experienced Mixed Martial Artist. I had no idea that I had already seen Hardy in RocknRolla and Inception then. Aside from having quickly become one of the finest actors on the planet, Hardy has an ability to physically disappear into roles in a way that we haven't seen since Gary Oldman's early work. Since then I've seen Hardy carry an entire film just driving in a car and talking on the phone in Locke, make you forget that you're watching the same actor playing twins in Legend, give powerhouse performances in films like The Drop, The Revenant and Bronson, audience thrilling performances in The Dark Knight Rises and Mad Max, Fury Road, and most recently give one of the best performances seen in a television series since James Gandolfini, his co-star in The Drop, in the stunningly good British production, Taboo. Hardy, as an actor is quite simply as good as it gets. So I found myself looking for anything else that Hardy has done which I somehow might have missed. And a friend told me about Child 44, which I had never even heard of. The film itself stretches believability a bit with the murder mystery aspect, asking us to buy into the idea that a Stalin era MGB (forerunner of the KGB) agent becomes obsessed with a child serial killer while his life is being torn to bits by the agency that he once worked for. The latter part has been written about extensively by writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It truly was a kind of inevitability that these "Blue Hats" would find themselves the subject of the same brutal paranoia and torture which helped them rise to power. Hardy sells the former aspect brilliantly, but even then, it feels a bit thin at times that a man in such an environment would be able to, let alone could become fixated on solving murders in a world where Stalin himself had declared that murder did not exist, that it was a product of corrupt western capitalism. This is a very small, negligible problem with the film because of its brilliant cast, which includes the aforementioned Gary Oldman, Hardy's co-star from The Drop, Noomi Rapace, and Joel Kinnaman, who was so brilliant in the TV series The Killing, as well as films like Suicide Squad, as the villain (Yeah, okay, he's another one...). There is also a wonderful sub textual underpinning of the paranoia of that time and place and how that can lead to a world where nothing is what you think it is. Hardy's lumbering stoic presence is yet one more remarkable physical transformation. As is almost always the case with Hardy, and with so many great British actors, there is never a moment of self indulgence or sentimentality about his character, which is dead on for this particular character. Rapace, who is no stranger to strange European murder mystery, having risen to wide public acclaim in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is wonderfully guarded and unreadable as Hardy's perhaps not so willing wife. Kinnaman, also having a background in Swedish film, is disturbingly calloused and unfeeling as Hardy's nemesis. And of course there's Gary Oldman, who, like Hardy, seems incapable of giving anything less than great performances. In this film, we see some vintage almost impossibly textured Gary Oldman moments, though his role is only slightly more than a kind of cameo. The rest of the cast is equally superb and the filmmaking is perfectly dark and brooding. That previously mentioned thin premise is almost entirely overpowered by the strength of the whole and is made only a minor blemish on an otherwise very close to perfect canvas. If you love Tom Hardy, even in a non-heterosexual way, you will definitely love this movie. Not quite as much as you may have loved Taboo, Locke, The Drop or Warrior. But probably as much as you loved Bronson or Legend.