Stalin-era Russia sucked, huh? Well, there’s news. “Next at 11: the sky is blue, water is wet, and Trump lies about something…” I suppose there’s a point here to be made about the self-defeating nature of propaganda, but it gets lost in muddled direction and confused screenplay. Child 44 is not unlike the exact milieu that birthed it: bleak, depressing, and a world you can’t wait to leave. And that was just the credits.
So I didn’t actually know this, but apparently Soviet Russia was marked by such an intense propaganda that murder wasn’t a thing. I suppose I should have known this from repeat readings of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it’s hard to tell what’s reality and what’s satire with George Orwell, knowwhatI’msayin’? Point is when you consider your country a “paradise” in which murder simply doesn’t happen because you say so, it kind of makes it hard to investigate when murder does happen.
And while the title emphasized the point, the film never really stressed the fact that there’s somebody who has gotten away with the murder of 44 little boys all because a national image became more important than reality. I’d say that’s sad, but we currently live in a country where the President has invented his own fact-free reality and millions of us have played along bith wittingly and unwittingly. Tough-but-fair Leo (Tom Hardy) is a captain in the Moscow MGB –it’s like KGB lite. His job is to hunt down “criminals” and coerce confessions, but we can all tell his heart just isn’t in it when he refuses to kill the kind of fodder guy who gets killed out-of-hand in a film like this. Problems escalate when his buddy’s son is found murdered, but because of politics, Leo has to promote the official line that the kid was drowned and then hit by a train. For some reason, this explanation seems wrong.
In the fallout, Leo and his maybe-pregnant-maybe-not wife Raisa (Noomi Rapace) are shuffled off to Volsk, where careers go to die. It is as this time in the film that Leo and Raisa are harassed by just about everybody. There’s a weak attempt on Leo’s life every other scene and, meanwhile, as Raisa is apparently the only attractive woman in the country, every dude with an accent and a ushanka comes by to get some hanka panka.
Of course, most Russian hobbies at this time included sour dough borscht and ratting on other Russians, so this is one of those “whom do you 
trust?” films. And that’s the problem. This should have been a murder mystery with some politics. Instead, it was a portrait of a country no one would ever visit, let alone live in, highlighted by several confusing fights. I was really hoping for some sort of insight into how murder investigations happened in Stalin’s U.S.S.R. What I got was: they weren’t. Don’t ask. Don’t tell. And for the sake of somebody-who-is-not-God-because-we’re-Communist, keep your thoughts to yourself at all times.
Child 44 might have made a decent reflection on the Fox News politburo state we currently live in. In fact, it might have made good satire, like The Death of Stalin. The movie, however, was made in 2015, so there was no reckoning of the future America where the process of solving a state crime could get you in hot water. This is bleak film. It takes a while to get going and I think it misses its own point because the experience would rather show us the world of Tom Hardy rather than the world of Communist Russia. Strangely, I think there’s a decent crime show that could be made of this material – it would be bleak and depressing, but if we got to see a man being able to play detective while wondering about political assassinations and forced Gulag vacations, well, that might have teeth. Child 44 had none.
Soviet Russia, the world’s biggest dump
Where perpetual poverty is known as a “slump”
Dead children would cause a scare
That is, if the pols gave a care
Not unlike the United States of Trump
Rated R, 137 Minutes
Director: Daniel Espinosa
Writer: Richard Price
Genre: Sucks to be Soviet
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Geez, I dunno. Gloating Nazis, maybe: “We lost the war, but won the battle”
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Stalinists. Do you ever get the feeling that you are not a target audience? This is that film, for the entire world.
