Great Film overall

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

3 out of 10 is the best I can do for this unfortunate film. As with many movies over the past 20 years, almost all scenes appear to have been shot with the camera's lens closed down a number of stops, thereby producing a dark, dark scene & atmosphere, hardly ever actually called for by activity. Granted, the subject matter is dark and nasty, but that is no excuse for continual scenes in which we can barely make out faces even. Bad, bad, bad !Further, much of the audio is difficult to follow, owing in part to mumbled lines, contorted accents, plus interfering background effects & music. I had expected a powerful film with excellent cinematography, but instead was presented with this lemon. Unfortunate. Not recommended.

What a bizarrely dull waste. The successful Child 44 book had three or four things going for it: a stunningly atmospheric opening in a winter of starvation (here rushed over and its relevance weakened), a big reveal (cut), the evolving relationship between Demidov and his wife as they first realize the emptiness of what they thought they had and then build anew (next to Noomi Rapace's pained wisdom Tom Hardy's Leo is a nice picture of inarticulate bewildered loyalty, war hero as premiership footballer out of his depth, but it doesn't go anywhere) and a reasonable cat-and-mouse/chase plot. Trying to squeeze in most of the narrative of the book, but still dropping a couple of significant facts and incidents, the film manages somehow to be both too long and too rushed. The Demidovs hurry back and forth across Russia having unpleasant train incidents, the commuter experience from hell, and then the mystery gets addressed in a couple of brisk and largely unrelated bits of business at the end. Espinosa worthily films most of the book, but loses its sense and its drama. Child 44 has some vivid styling and performances (largely for decoration – Cassel is intimidating because he's Cassel, nothing more; Oldman has to resort to maximum shouting-and-spitting to get any drama into his scenes; Dance, as so often, is paraded as a token of film gravity), but it's otherwise as empty and lifeless as its Siberian wilderness.The Script Hack (https://thescripthack.wordpress.com/): if we're skipping the plot relevance of the starvation opening, we can skip the whole scene; if we're dropping the key bits of information gained from the mid-story return to Moscow, we can drop that whole sequence; and we could trim some of the secondary scenes (the last, for example, nicely true to the book, could be 30 seconds instead of five minutes). That would create much more time and space to pace and build the mystery and anticipation and drama of the hunt, and the relationships at its heart, and still leave a tighter more powerful film.

I was quite disappointed because I had read the book, which I recommend instead. The book has some stunning surprises and plot twists -- all of which were eliminated for this movie. As a result, much doesn't make sense.Important characters -- including the killer -- are undeveloped.The movie does a fair job of capturing the feeling of oppression, although the paranoia in the book is more intense.

Child 44 follows a man who, after learning of the deaths of several children, begins a search for the man who murdered them, despite the fact that they were written off as accidents. I love me a good crime thriller, really I do. And when I see a plot like this where the movie is brave enough to deal with a subject like murdering children, then it casts Tom Hardy, then color me interested. Unfortunately, the actual plot doesn't start until the last forty minutes of this 137 minutes film. And even then, none of it is really all that interesting or even easy to follow. In fact by the time the plot starts rolling the script just stops trying to make sense. There's a scene that, under normal circumstances, would sound pretty awesome where a bunch of people start fighting and killing each other on a train cart, but in context there isn't actually any. The scene begins when some random expendable character pulls out a knife and tries to attack the protagonists. Somehow said protagonists know exactly what he's planning the second he stands up, and this big fight ensues. Sure, it's cool, but it doesn't make any sense. At that point I gave up on trying to understand the movie. The actual finding of the killer ends up being super anti- climatic and watered down, and it's just not engaging at all. What about the 100 minutes leading up to the actual plot you may ask? Nothing happens. It's 'character development' where none of the characters are interesting and nothing that pulls, or more drags, the oncoming plot along are anything special. It's just a whole lot of nothing.Overall Child 44 is kind of boring and dumb for the vast majority of it, yet somehow worse when the actual plot starts. In the end I would never recommend this colossal waste of time and talent.