While I walked in the theater I expected a good movie. Because I liked the concept of the story as it was set-up in the trailer. But mostly because I 'trusted' Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman to pick a good movie to play in. While I walked out the theater I had different thoughts unfortunately. The film was disappointing to me and I will try to explain why. It wasn't the acting and 'world building' but I disliked the directing, screenplay and filming.

First of the directing and filming, all of the action scenes where flooded with shaky cam. This was handled very badly in my opinion. I couldn't figure out what was happening most of the time. Due to the shaky cam, number of cuts, close-ups and the peace of all that. That was the main reason why I disliked 'Safe House', which is also made by Daniel Espinosa. It almost felt like he was trying the make the filming and directing 'not perfectly on purpose' to make it 'real' but it didn't worked out at all! It all felt kinda clumsy and there were way to many meaningless shots overall. There were some exceptions, some shots of the cities and area's they visited where beautifully. They really landed the rough and dark tone that they successfully tried the show. Although they over did it sometimes.

Then the screenplay or script, which is based on a 'best selling novel', again! First of you get a nice back story of Tom Hardy's main character, which felt real to me. All of the other characters felt a bit empty, like they were there to fill a place that was written for them. That made it almost impossible for my to understand the characters and the decisions they make. I also missed the whole balance in the story. The first part was way to long ( set-up ), the middle was rush ( plot kicks in ) and the final party ( ending ) was also rushed and kinda unbelievable. I think because of this I wasn't sucked in to the story. The second and third party felt way to easy and straight forward. Like solving a child murder case which is spread over thousand of miles is easy. I think the story could be told in a better and more interesting way.

Overall I was disappointed by Child 44. The dark Russia after WWII was displayed intense but the story lagged suspension and balance. The action scenes sucked even more than the conversations because of the directing and filming methods they just. Tom Hardy did is part good but not brilliant and unfortunately Gary Oldman's characters was barely in it. I give Child 44 an 5 aka 'Meh'! Thanks for reading!

This was such a mixed bag. Tom Hardy's performance was fine, and I enjoyed the overall atmosphere of the film. It certainly did evoke Soviet Russia.

But the pacing is just so off. The movie is slow where it should be moving along to get to the point, and rushes through the good parts. Combine that with underdeveloped characters whose motivations are more or less completely opaque, and you have a recipe for boredom in the midst of what should be an interesting story.

Some elements, like the homosexuality bit that other reviewers mentioned, were simply unnecessary. As a whole, the script could have been much tighter and leaner. And I'm unclear on what happened in several places due to the shaky, "realistic" camera work during action scenes.

I don't understand Raisa. [spoiler]She openly admits that she married Leo out of fear, but when given the chance to leave him and be with someone she does love, she doubles down and stays with Leo?[/spoiler] For this character-related reason (and many others), I might have to seek out alternative versions of the story (the book, or the other film _Citizen X_) to understand it.

5.4 for me. Not quite boring enough to be "Meh", but too poorly paced to be truly "Fair".

**An overly ambitious film, but still an interesting one.**

Honestly, I expected a little more from this movie. I found it on television, just by chance, but I had already heard about it, I'm not sure for what purpose, but I had the impression that it was a very good film. It's not as good as I expected, as it gets a little lost between politics and police mystery, and that ends up compromising the pace.

It all starts with a drama where an MGB agent named Leo Demidov tries to protect his wife after a political prisoner denounces her as his accomplice. The effort pays off, but it's so obvious that he wanted to protect her that his superiors send him to an industrial city on the outskirts of Ukraine. Meanwhile, he will have to tell a friend that his son died in an alleged train accident, but it is clear that the child was murdered. In the new city where he is posted, Leo discovers many more cases of children in the same situation, deducing that there is a murderer killing children along the railway line. The problem is to convince the Soviet police that these crimes are not exclusive to the capitalist world.

The film has good dialogues and the script is very good, but I felt that it is too ambitious and that it ends up not being able to handle it well. The difficulty in reconciling the two subplots (the criminal on the loose and the protagonist's conflict with the fanatical authorities), both equally powerful and relevant, is palpable. There is another plot point that leaves me with a lot of doubts, and that has to do with how Leo's wife changes radically, from someone passive and without relevance in the story to an active and cooperative figure, central to the following events. If this change, on the one hand, made it possible to put her back at the center of events, it also seems to be an inconsistency. The ending isn't bad, but it's inelegant: the atmosphere of tension and suspense gives way to more action, in absolute contrast to what the film had been doing.

The cast features several well-known actors, starting with Tom Hardy and Noomi Rapace in the lead roles. None of them were bad, they are both quite confidant and the interpretation they bring us is solid and well concepted. Joel Kinnaman is a convincing villain and plays the political fanatic well. Vincent Cassel and Gary Oldman are well-known veterans and pretty safe bets for the most prominent secondary characters. The only negative point I have to make (and I think it's not the actors' fault, but director Espinosa's) is that terrible pseudo-Russian accent that the actors tried to emulate, and which should never have been done. If the director wanted that kind of accent so badly, then he should have looked for Russian or Eastern actors who could speak in English.

Technically, the film relies heavily on cinematography and camera work. They tried as hard as they could for these elements to convey a variety of sensations to the public, from the biting Winter cold to the inhospitable, gray, unfriendly and distrustful atmosphere of Soviet cities during the 1950s. I also really liked the cars, the uniforms, costumes and sets, as there was a good effort at historical reconstruction, in general. The soundtrack does its job, but it doesn't stay in the ear.

**A war hero who turned a police officer struggles with his departmental feud.**

It is a strange title. In the narration as well it does not properly reveals, more like an approximate count of something. It is a Russian story, I mean the Russian characters and the locations. It begins after the world war two, in Moscow, a top police officer caught between the departmental politics and a case. After the his investigation ended without a result, the sacked officer gets a lifeline to begin again life in another town. But the trouble follows him when he started to investigate the children's deaths. The result of the case brings the end to the tale with a tiny small twist.

The actors were decent, not very impressive. Especially I understand since it was internationally produced, they preferred English language, but I would have liked it in the original language to get best appeal. It was too long film, the first half was very boring. Because it was most unrelated to what comes in the later part of the film. When the narration shifts its base out of the Moscow, that's where it really gets very interesting. So after first 60 minutes, the real story begins.

This where the actors got better. Noomi Rapace and Tom Hardy, both were like the kicked off with full of energy. So the second half of the film makes it watchable. Directed by a 'Easy Money' filmmaker who also brought in his Swedish actors to play the smaller roles. It was not good as I expected, but ended well. I don't think it is worth a watch, but who knows what you like. So I neither recommend nor reject it. But it was an average film to me.

_5/10_

Despite Oldman's involvement, it lacks all the dark charm of HBO's Citizen X. There is less of a dual examination of both the system of the USSR and Chikatilo, and the film suffers from that.

It's a little less compelling, the situation that unravels seems more incompetent than meddled. And the commentary that is left is more of the "this is what life was like under communism" and less of the "this is how the communist system interfered with the investigation and postponed his arrest"

You can kind of taste the difference between the two, as they are both important, the cops look more incompetent with this version, and that is, I think, doing them a bit of a disservice.

On the other hand, I doubt one would see either criticism if it were made today, so...take what you can get.