SECONDSCREEN
Child 44
Cert: 16 Time: 2hrs 17mins
★★ ★★★
The Salvation
Cert: 15A Time: 1hr 33mins
★★★ ★★
Dark Horse
Cert: G Time: 1hr 25mins
★★★ ★★
Child 44 combines a sweep of 20th-century history with a Cold War setting and yet, for all its epic ambitions, fails to disguise its airport-thriller origins. In Joseph Stalin’s USSR of 1953, a paedophile serial killer is on the loose and the only person who can stop him is Leo Demidov (Tom Hardy), a Ministry of State Intelligence star.
But Demidov has problems of his own. When his wife is denounced as a traitor, he doesn’t believe it and won’t join the clamour to condemn her. As a result they are both exiled to Volsk. How’s he going to catch a serial killer there?
With preposterous subplots coming and going and everyone talking in pantomime Russian accents, this absurdly overblown production is surely one that Hardy and co-stars Noomi Rapace, Gary Oldman and Joel Kinnaman will want to forget.
The iconoclastic Danish director Lars von Trier has never made a Western, although his pared down Prohibition-era drama,
Dogville, from 2003, perhaps gave us a clue to the violent, cruel and misogynistic world he would no doubt be aiming for. Now, however, he doesn’t need to because his compatriot Kristian Levring has pretty much done it for him.
The Salvation is about as cruel and bleak a Western as you can imagine. No sooner has a pretty Danish wife arrived in the Midwest to be reunited with her soldier-turned-rancher husband, Jon, than she’s raped and murdered, and their young son is killed too. Her grieving husband (Mads
Mikkelsen) does what a man has to do, little knowing the carnage he is about to unleash.
The casting is eccentric (look out for Eric Cantona as ‘the Corsican’), the script seems to have too many words, and some acting is poor. But it’s bravely dark and is certainly a challenging addition to the canon.
Matthew Bond
An allotment in an ex-mining village in Wales becomes the unlikely breeding ground for a champion in the documentary Dark Horse. Louise Osmond’s cheery tale tells of a local consortium, led by barmaid Jan, who breed a horse named Dream Alliance whom the tabloids dub ‘SlumNag Millionaire’.
A true story, the film pits the disenfranchised locals against the toffs of racing. ‘They like to keep us commoners out,’ remarks Jan. ‘But when you want something bad enough, you’ll do anything, won’t you?’
Jan gets her spindly young horse into a smart training stables, whose boss duly weighs in to describe the newcomer as ‘a snotty-nosed little comp boy turning up at Eton for his first day’. Cue Tom Jones singing about the valleys while Dream Alliance hurdles all the way to a Welsh Grand National triumph.
As a documentary it’s full of fun and inspiration, but tries a touch too hard to be remade as an Ealing comedy.
Jason Solomons