Death of Stalin is weak tea amusing, and a failure to achieve irony or comedy

Rating: 2/10 (27 March 2018)

Armando Iannuccis' 'Death of Stalin' does work as slapstick, although it has elements of broad humor, absurd situation, and violent actions. Now does it satisfy as a comedy of errors as it explores the scramble for power after the death of Josef Stalin, who ruled the USSR with an iron fist from the death of Lenin until a cerebral hemorrhage fell him in March 1953.
Iannucci's script relates a series of events made ridiculous by any number of faux pas throughout.
Which raises the question: is Stalin's demise and the jockeying to replace him by his lieutenants--Malenkov, Bulganin, Molotov, Khrushchev and the hated Beria--a subject for opera buffa? Such a treatment minimize, nay makes light of the large shadow that Stalin cast at home and abroad, as well the US' response of a cold wra, witch hunts (a page form Stalin's own playbook) and implanting military bases to hem in the Soviet Union, developing a powerful nuclear arsenal, engagin him hot and cold wars to defeat Communism?
'The Death of Stalin' strains credulity. It brings to mind the simplistic B films Hollywood made and it does ignore the radio and television dramas that fanned a mindless anti-Communism that alas exists. tody.
Jeffrey Tambour as a feckless Malenkov; Michael Palin, a fretful Molotov; Paul Chahidi as a silent Bulganin; and Steve Buschemi as a Krushchev with a high tone and reedy voice strain credulity as a man who outwitted his rivals and took Stalain's place. (Can this be the man who denounced Stalin's excesses at the 20th Party Congress? or the force man who banged his shoe at a UN General Assembly or frighten the green JFK when they met in Vienna?) As for Kaganovich and Mikoyan they have no real voice at all.Only
Simon Russel Beale as the feared KGB boss Lavrenti Beria breathes life into his role: a man who embodies the fear of a reign of terror, canny and plotting to remove all his rivals by firing squad, and who clever by half, hoists his own petard by mock trial and summary execution.
If anything, the chaos following Stalin's death is more apt to Donald Trump's White House.