Director: Daniel Espinosa
Screenplay: Richard Price
Starring: Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Noomi Rapace, Joel
Kinnaman, Paddy Considine, Jason Clarke, Vincent Cassel
Synopsis is here:
I often find myself getting into conversations of
adaptation, with a good friend of mine whose and avid consumer of books and
film. Our talks usually debate about how a film can keep hold of the book's
spirit. It can never be the book. It’s not that medium, nor should it aspire to
be. Not every element can make the translation. Filmmakers must traipse through
the difficult task of pruning and trimming in order to gain the right fruits
for the film to bear. Child 44 is a film in which clearly somebody wanted all
the fruits to grow. Due to this there’s far much to pick. It is then when we yield
rotten berries.
A telling review of the novel by Angus Macqueen, hints the
story’s commercial aspirations, but also describes the writer Tom Rob Smith’s
desire to encompass so much of Stalin’s Russia into the fiction, that it
becomes difficult to take the book too seriously. While I cannot fully pass
judgement on the novel. I can say that it’s hard not to feel similarly about the
film.
Child 44 is quite simply a thriller that doesn’t thrill. It
alludes to richness by placing forth a multitude of sub-plots, but does little
to give them decent resolutions. It suggests relationships with depth, but does
little to build on them. The film suffers from the same irritation that comes
with Michael Bay’s Transformer Movies, in which length is believed to be a
decent substitute for scale. The film's setting and historical background should
provide intrigue. Yet this is clouded by drab conversations in dubious faux Russian
accents and multiple scenes which grind the pace of the film to halt. Moments
which should be revelations, never build to the vital discoveries the film
purports them to be. This is mainly because the film never allows such moments to
breathe. The elements of the overstuffed narrative come across just as
cumbersome as the films clunky action set pieces. The film’s climax ends up in
a muddy quagmire, which amused me, as this is how I felt about the piece in
general.
Directed by Daniel Espinosa (Easy Money) is more than
capable of crafting taut, commercial thrillers. Safe House (2012) is a solid
example of that. Here, however, his talents seemed bogged down by a predictable
screenplay (a rare misfire from scribe Richard Price), which holds a truckload of moving parts. Despite the valiant efforts of its brooding cast, so many of the film's characters feel on the periphery
of the narrative. There’s a nagging feeling that one or two players had more
moments left on the cutting room floor. Then again, this could have made Child
44 possibly longer. Which for myself, could have been more torture than being
sent to a gulag. A contrived line? Perhaps. But no more than what Child 44
deserves. For the same price of a ticket, you could purchase Fritz Lang’s
excellent M (1931) on Blu Ray, which not only deals with similar issues better,
but is nearly 30 minutes shorter. The value of economy, eh?
