It's been a long wait since Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Dark Knight Rises and Lawless to have Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman in the same film again, and from poster to plot, the Soviet era Child 44 promised tonnes in terms of thesp thrills. Sadly, they're all too few - but that's not the fault of either man.
Adapted from the Tom Rob Smith best-seller, the film introduces the fascinating character of Leo Demidov (Hardy) - orphanage survivor, war hero, party stalwart and bloodhound investigator. Capable of great terror but also tenderness, Demidov is a company man with a conscience who is heading for the crossroads in his life. He arrives when the body of a child is found beside railway tracks and the Kremlin's idea of an investigation is of the under-the-carpet rather than pull-up-the-floorboards variety. Time for Demidov to decide who he really is.
This is a textbook example of a story that should have been brought to the small screen rather than the big one - the six-hour BBC or HBO classic, as opposed to the two-and-a-bit-hour, more-rushing-than-Russian cinematic charge. Child 44 tries to shoe-horn massive chunks of a book into a frustratingly tight running time, with the result that character complexity and tension are lost as plot developments pile up like parts on a tractor assembly line because someone set the conveyor belt at the wrong speed.
Here, the dynamic between Hardy and screen wife Noomi Rapace see-saws too much and too quickly; there's a change of heart that doesn't convince and the villains are disappointing, with the introduction of one in particular playing out as, 'Here he is - we've taken too long with the build-up and now we're stuck for time'. Oh to talk to author-turned-screenwriter Richard Price (Clockers, The Wire) about the whole process.
There are some great moments between Hardy's Demidov and Oldman as the ornery General Nesterov but the relationship, like many other things here, is not all that it could be.
Red missed, if you will.
Harry Guerin
