THE DEATH OF STALIN (2017)

THE DEATH OF STALIN (2017)

Tagline: In the Kremlin, no one can hear you scheme.

(Junk History, Drama, Stupidity) [R]

Nod as I'm speaking to you. People are looking to me for reassurance and I have no idea what's going on.

In this one, based on a French graphic novel, we are taken back to 1953 Moscow, just before Vissarionovich Stalin’s death, and a power struggle between the shady members of the Council Of Ministers. 

First off, this movie is meant to be a dark comedy with outrageous performances and over-the-top dialog. To some, it is probably those things, but I really found only one scene at the very beginning even remotely funny. It has to do with a performance having to be redone for Stalin because it wasn’t recorded for him the first time. The audience was forced to stay as well and endure the performance again. This leads to some funny lines but outside of that, this movie is just a giant mess. 

Acting-wise this movie had one of my favorite actors ever Steve Buscemi (best known for BILLY MADISON and a ton of other Adam Sandler movies) who plays the ruthless Nikita Khrushchev. Buscemi is good, but seeing him in a role like this didn’t do my opinion of him any favors. We also get a comical but also "dark" performance from Jeffrey Tambor who is probably best known for the TV show “Arrested Development”. His role didn’t make me like him either even though he might have been the least corrupt of everyone on screen. 

The movie deals with butchers, sexual predators, and shady characters as the main thrust of the storyline so I think it was already going to struggle as a comedy. I will say one historical figure I did like from the movie was Maria Veniaminovna Yudina who was played by Olga Kurylenko (who is best known for BLACK WIDOW). At least her character wasn’t corrupt and actually went against the system. In real life, she was an accomplished pianist and Orthodox Christian. I mention this because the movie actually gives her lines eluding to her faith only to be mocked by Nikita Khrushchev. Unfortunately, she is only in a few short scenes because of course the main crux of the story was about the chaos to fill this power vacuum. Olga Kurylenko is the only cast member that is from the Soviet Union in the entire movie. 

Needless to say, the performances were good, but overall if this was supposed to be a comedy, it just fell amazingly flat. I mean this damn movie is really bad and really boring. The music is fine for this type of movie and the cinematography is decent, but many of the scenes feel dragged out forever and ever. In fact, I could have easily just watch another movie during some of this and totally been able to keep up on what was happened. A lot of uninteresting stupidity. 

I don’t even know if I would want to see a serious documentary on this. Just reading how communism and socialism work, it was enough to know that Stalin killed over 40 million people during his reign of terror in Russia. “Check please…” Anyway, for me, this was a slow-moving largely boring movie with a few interesting moments and some actual humor if you really dig deep in the seat cushions for it. 

For me, this is a 2 out of 7 and the 2 is only for the performances (without them, we’d be talking about a 1 or 0). Outside of that, I really didn’t like this freakin thing.

GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF MAIN JOURNEY AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY. 

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