Child 44, based on a popular airport novel by Tom Rob Smith, is a big, dowdy, lumbering dud. It almost registers as a curiosity, an out-of-time anti-Soviet nightmare featuring many highly respected actors and which clearly cost a great deal to produce. Any expended funds shall not be recouped. The storyline is confused and labyrinthine. The advertising portrays it as the story of a child predator rampaging through a 1950s Soviet Union in which no comrade will admit murders, deemed a symptom of capitalism, ever transpire in Stalin's paradise. Except, of course, for one strong-arm secret policeman, Leo (Tom Hardy), for whom the investigation raises intense, but ultimately productive moral and political quandaries. And this is, in a way, the central thrust, but, wow, can this film move laboriously and lose focus. There are so many dour subplots, incoherent transitions, and poorly defined tensions, as if they ballooned a 90-minute picture with extraneous notes of self-importance or crudely cut a season of television down to feature length. The child murders only come to fore an hour into a film lasting a numbing, feels-even-longer 2 hours and twenty minutes, and the identity of the culprit is revealed with the grace of a particularly uninspired episode of Criminal Minds.

The gargantuan problem of storytelling and thematic opacity, as well as lax pacing, is compounded by a wildly ugly aesthetic, full of brown-on-grey medium shots and, during chase and fight sequences, disorienting editing. (It is appropriate the story is resolved with three central characters mud wrestling in what could be a pit of diarrhea.) Also rather ugly? The rogues' gallery of questionable Russian accents, with performers of many nationalities—Australian, English, French, Swedish—trying their mouthful-of-borscht best with distracting and inconsistent results, although even in a film as bad as this, Hardy remains a charismatic and imposing presence. Everyone else is either squandered or miscast.

D