Gripping tale turns lame

With Russian belligerence very much in the news, it sometimes feels like Perestroika never happened. So it's a good time to bring to the screen Tom Rob Smith's 2008 crime novel, which depicts the oppression of the Soviet era and the difficulty of hunting a serial killer in a regime that regarded murder as a solely capitalist disease.

But despite Smith's skilled combination of historical detail and page-turning action, the film is a terrible disappointment, marred by a misjudged central performance and a lack of dramatic tension. It's rare that a book actually trumps a film for action.

Smith loosely based his novel on the real-life crimes of serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, the "Butcher of Rostov", who in 1992 was convicted of murdering more than 50 women and children. That said, the author's focus is not on the killer, but a fictional state security officer for the MGB (precursor to the KGB), whose fall from grace leads him to conduct a clandestine investigation into a series of child murders, as a form of redemption for sentencing so many innocents to death.

The film is adapted by the American novelist and screenwriter Richard Price (The Color of Money) and directed by up-and-coming Swede Daniel Espinosa. With one major exception, they remain faithful to the novel, not only ticking most of the plot points but also capturing its bleak tone, a milieu in which even families can't trust each other, and forced confessions play like dominoes.

Thus we follow the rise and fall of loyal state enforcer Leo Demidov (Tom Hardy) and his exile with wife Raisa (Noomi Rapace) from Moscow to a hellish industrial backwater in the Urals. Here, he teams up with local militiaman General Mikhail Nesterov (Gary Oldman) to track the killer who's been slaughtering kids on the railway tracks. The question of the couple's long-term survival plays in tandem with the chase for the killer.

On the page, this is pretty gripping, as well as informative about the day-to-day fear engendered by a totalitarian state. On screen, despite the occasional flourish, it's moribund.

Surprisingly central to the film's failings is the performance of its star, the usually compelling Tom Hardy. It's difficult to tell whether the Brit is unsure about his character, or has over-thought him; I suspect the latter. Fuelled by an unnecessary and distracting Russian accent, the performance is incredibly mannered and inconsistent. Rather than an able man who slowly frees himself from unthinking compliance to the state machine, we get a character who's impossible to grasp, one moment a lumbering buffoon, the next articulate and sensitive. Instead of complex, it's simply alienating.

Among the rest of the cast, Oldman and Vincent Cassel as Leo's MGB boss are both under-used. And Joel Kinnaman as conniving and vicious fellow officer Vasili, is given little chance to play beyond the cardboard villain. The stand-out performer is Rapace, who movingly conveys the caged unhappiness of a woman who only agreed to marry Leo because she was afraid to say no, but then finds real emotion developing as he discovers genuine purpose.

In fact, the film's most exciting moments also involve Rapace, as Raisa and Leo get each other out of some life-threatening scraps - even if a school teacher suddenly kicking ass is a bit hard to swallow.

But for the most part, and despite some excellent, evocative production design, Espinosa turns this great material into a heavy-handed, stolid affair, all the way to a lame climax, when neither Vasili nor the child killer receive the send-offs they deserve.