Purely Joyful Movie!

Instant Favorite.

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A Disappointing Continuation

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.

A serial murderer is at large in Stalinist USSR (1945). The victims are young boys. That is the background to what is really an attack on Stalinist tactics. We don't see much of the crime or even the investigation. Mostly we see a Western take on Soviet suppression. Don't get me wrong, Stalin was a mass murderer on a historic scale, and deserves vilification. But his minions were individuals. "Child 44" doesn't recognize such complexity. Instead, it reduces almost every character to good or evil. The exception is Raisa (Noomi Rapace in a beautiful performance), the wife of a captain in Soviet intelligence, Leo Demidov (Tom Hardy, in what may be his best performance to date). The arc of the story takes her from feeling forced into a marriage to a powerful gendarme to the dawning realization that Leo is a good man struggling with his brutal role and reputation in society.Ultimately, the two principal bad guys-- the child murderer (Paddy Considine) and Leo's colleague and nemesis (Joel Kinnaman)-- are nothing more than plot devices to deliver scenes of brutality, including a protracted beating of Leo. I saw the film streaming on TV, so I could fast-forward through scenes that made me suspect sadistic tendencies in the director, Daniel Espinosa. The only other film of his that I saw, "Safe House," showed the same tendencies ( and his 2017 movie "Life" has no shortage of pain and gore, according to reviews I read.) I'm not squeamish; there is a place for violence in cinema. But Espinosa indulged in it well beyond the needs of the story. The running time of 137 minutes is a tell. And the power of the story is not about the Soviet purges and gulags, where violence occurred. The story, at its heart, is about one spouse finding the true moral character in another-- a wife learning to trust her husband's love, and coming to love him in return. It's too bad such sensitivity didn't inform all the characters in the story, or spare the audience the excessive bloodthirst.

Wow! Where to begin? I had skipped this movie earlier when it was available for buying but after watching recent performances of Tom Hardy, I thought to give this movie a go and judge it for myself. And boy was I surprised! This is such an underrated movie for no reason at all. After watching the movie, it's baffling to see the negative reviews and low scores this movie received. It's totally beyond my understanding what could've been the possible reason for this movie to get such a hammering from critics. Everything in the movie was top notch, right from the layered story, the mood of the time in which this takes place, the performances, I mean everything! Tom Hardy and Noomi Rapace, the two leads were just perfect. It's disheartening to see why this movie wasn't considered for any awards or a positive genuine review. There are some unanswered questions as to how Tom Hardy's character was fully reinstated and some other minor things towards the end but overall this is a really dark and powerful movie which raises some sensitive issues and is blessed with genuine performances. I sure am glad that I watched this rare gem.

So this is how Russia was like during the days of the USSR, just absolutely horrible all with a broken law system and having absolutely no freedom.The film itself was too awfully depressing and sad in a grim way, all this just made the film incredibly dull. There was absolutely no sense of nice things to come, just more bad news and the story was far too incredibly hard and confusing to follow.I just didn't like this film despite this film having good talented actors like Gary Oldman. Most of the film was simply too boring and uninteresting.I would seriously recommend everyone to avoid this film, a film this boring and hard to follow is not worth watching.