Child 44

2015 "How do you find a killer who doesn’t exist?"
6.4| 2h17m| R| en| More Info
Released: 17 April 2015 Released
Producted By: Summit Entertainment
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Synopsis

Set in Stalin-era Soviet Union, a disgraced MGB agent is dispatched to investigate a series of child murders -- a case that begins to connect with the very top of party leadership.

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Reviews

TeenzTen An action-packed slog
SparkMore n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.
AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,
Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.
krocheav A story with promise and an interesting setting (serial child murders in Russia during WWII and beyond) is left labouring due to overbearing treatment. It suffers throughout from cinematography featuring clumsy hand-held cameras and zoom lenses set too close to the subjects - giving a suffocated and incomplete feel to the narrative. The entire treatment is dark and grotty and while this can sometimes be an atmospheric plus, here it's so unrelenting it becomes tiresome. Overly convoluted 'style' and heavy violence tend to be used as substitutes for quality story elements - this could leave some viewers unsatisfied - forced dialects are also off-putting and quickly become annoying. Fans of the stars Tom Hardy & Gary Oldman (the latter's role surfacing in the last half only!) may survive to the finish while others might give up way before the lengthy 2h 17m is halfway through.
Cheese world Only good thing about this movie is the acting which is Great.Movie really doesn't focus on the murder of the children, it mainly focuses on Leo and his wife problem with the Russian Embassy. Movie should have a different title, even if the title is changed to fit the movie, its still trash.
Irie212 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.
Rocketeer_Raccoon 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.