Working Overtime
Film: Child 44
Cast: Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, Gary Oldman
Directed by: Daniel Espinosa
Duration: 2 hrs 17 mins
Rating: * *
Based on the first book of the trilogy by Tom Rob Smith, it
hard to imagine how they came up with this kind of a film when such an
illustrious cast and not to mention producer Ridley Scott who had the rights.
Firstly, since it is set in Russia, the film shouldn’t have
been made in English, those accents fluctuate between atrocious and silly.
Secondly, the screenplay is so muddled that it tries to do tell too many things
at the same time with a fairly disastrous result.
There are no murders in Paradise, we
are told, paradise being the USSR under Stalin. Life after war was not easy
there, life during
and before the war was not particularly good was not particularly good for
Demidov (Tom Hardy), a state security officer. While they are busy chasing
dissidents and prosecuting them for treason, a series of child murders occur,
but they are all hushed up because of the murders in paradise thing.
Meanwhile Demidov’s wife (Noomi Rapace) who married him out
of fear because he was a secret service agent, is suspected of treason. He gets
demoted and is sent to a remote part of the country but the murders still
intrigue him. Eventually the plot settles down and it becomes a murder mystery
but neither with any conviction nor with the element of suspense.
What should have been a taut thriller ends up with just about
every ingredient going wrong. It is almost as if they took random passages from
the book and decided to shoot them. The actors just go through the motions you
have to admire Tom Hardy for putting in that effort although that accent could
vie for one of the worst of all time.
Published in The Navhind Times on 28th June
No comments:
Post a Comment