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Fresh and Exciting

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

It's like I really do want it I think that Tom hardy is a decent actor, but please someone tell him he doesn't need to put on a stupid accent in EVERY single film, overact and ruin it! Apart from that, this could have been really good. But the pace, script, acting and , well, everything, was just so slow, dull and after an hour wasn't going anywhere so had to give up.

Old school cinema is a lot like classical painting. Not too much abstraction, just life as it is. For people born in our times it's hard to understand the Nazi Germany or the Stalinist Soviet Union. It was a time when a country's leaders contemplated genocide the same way accountants today contemplate massive layoffs. The movie is about the adventures of a war hero who finds that searching for the truth about the murder of a child happens not only to contradict what was politically correct for the communists but also to put his and his wife's life in danger. I'm not going to detail much the story, because it's one of the best parts of the movie. It also has a lot of action and shooting, as one would expect from an American movie.There is also proper character development for people looking for that, as the main characters change and become other people at the end of the adventure. And it's a very dark adventure with many cliffhangers, shot in very dark colors as one would expect in a Soviet Union seen through American eyes. In contrast, the very few Soviet movies I watched seemed much happier and brighter.There is an interesting message the movie seems to send. It says that it is people's duty to do good despite idiot politicians and it can be done either at great personal danger by contradicting the propaganda, or much easier by being creative and finding a way to dress nicely the offending initiative. This is what in capitalism is called good salesmanship.

What a bizarrely dull waste. The successful Child 44 book had three or four things going for it: a stunningly atmospheric opening in a winter of starvation (here rushed over and its relevance weakened), a big reveal (cut), the evolving relationship between Demidov and his wife as they first realize the emptiness of what they thought they had and then build anew (next to Noomi Rapace's pained wisdom Tom Hardy's Leo is a nice picture of inarticulate bewildered loyalty, war hero as premiership footballer out of his depth, but it doesn't go anywhere) and a reasonable cat-and-mouse/chase plot. Trying to squeeze in most of the narrative of the book, but still dropping a couple of significant facts and incidents, the film manages somehow to be both too long and too rushed. The Demidovs hurry back and forth across Russia having unpleasant train incidents, the commuter experience from hell, and then the mystery gets addressed in a couple of brisk and largely unrelated bits of business at the end. Espinosa worthily films most of the book, but loses its sense and its drama. Child 44 has some vivid styling and performances (largely for decoration – Cassel is intimidating because he's Cassel, nothing more; Oldman has to resort to maximum shouting-and-spitting to get any drama into his scenes; Dance, as so often, is paraded as a token of film gravity), but it's otherwise as empty and lifeless as its Siberian wilderness.The Script Hack (https://thescripthack.wordpress.com/): if we're skipping the plot relevance of the starvation opening, we can skip the whole scene; if we're dropping the key bits of information gained from the mid-story return to Moscow, we can drop that whole sequence; and we could trim some of the secondary scenes (the last, for example, nicely true to the book, could be 30 seconds instead of five minutes). That would create much more time and space to pace and build the mystery and anticipation and drama of the hunt, and the relationships at its heart, and still leave a tighter more powerful film.

Child 44 follows a man who, after learning of the deaths of several children, begins a search for the man who murdered them, despite the fact that they were written off as accidents. I love me a good crime thriller, really I do. And when I see a plot like this where the movie is brave enough to deal with a subject like murdering children, then it casts Tom Hardy, then color me interested. Unfortunately, the actual plot doesn't start until the last forty minutes of this 137 minutes film. And even then, none of it is really all that interesting or even easy to follow. In fact by the time the plot starts rolling the script just stops trying to make sense. There's a scene that, under normal circumstances, would sound pretty awesome where a bunch of people start fighting and killing each other on a train cart, but in context there isn't actually any. The scene begins when some random expendable character pulls out a knife and tries to attack the protagonists. Somehow said protagonists know exactly what he's planning the second he stands up, and this big fight ensues. Sure, it's cool, but it doesn't make any sense. At that point I gave up on trying to understand the movie. The actual finding of the killer ends up being super anti- climatic and watered down, and it's just not engaging at all. What about the 100 minutes leading up to the actual plot you may ask? Nothing happens. It's 'character development' where none of the characters are interesting and nothing that pulls, or more drags, the oncoming plot along are anything special. It's just a whole lot of nothing.Overall Child 44 is kind of boring and dumb for the vast majority of it, yet somehow worse when the actual plot starts. In the end I would never recommend this colossal waste of time and talent.