Film Review: The Death of Stalin

You know when you want to love a film, you try to love a film, you almost love a film…but your love fades before the film ends?

When I first saw the trailer for The Death of Stalin, I gently LOLZed my way through it and decided I was keen to see the full thing when it hit the cinemas.

Sadly, the trailer did what the best/worst movie trailers do — it strung together nearly all the funniest bits of a movie to get you through the door.

It’s not that it was stinky bad.

Not at all.

It’s just that you feel in watching it that it could have been so much funnier.

Directed by Armando Iannuci, who I worship for time immemorial for his work on my favourite comedy ever, Veep, and another cutting political satire I also loved, In the Loop, the film is true to form stylistically.

It is based around, yes, you guessed it, the death of Josef Stalin, the longest-serving Soviet leader, although Putin with his ‘win’ (for want of a better word) last weekend will put him in reach of ‘serving’ his comrades for just as long a time.

No parallels there. Just saying.

Within the first few minutes of The Death of Stalin, you are drawn into a world where rapier sharp one-liners are par for the course, made all the more funny by the fact that, as with Veep, they are delivered by historical characters one could never imagine being so vulgar, crude or essentially human.

Tripling the potential-for-humour quotient are a cast of notables, including Steve Buscemi (Krushchev), Jeffrey Tambor (Malenkov), Jason Isaacs (Zhukov), Michael Palin (Molotov) and Rupert Friend (Vasily Stalin), whose mish-mash of natural US and British accents (no BAD Russian accents = winning) also magnify the LOLZ.

This, all against the very uncomfortable backdrop of the constant threat of being on ‘the list’, the infamous shooting list Stalin and his Politburo put together to rid the Union of dissenters.

While the film is based on historical horrors and atrocities, with the camera’s eye at times drawing attention to this in such a way as to try and stop you smiling at some witty dialogue or foreground action taking place, unlike some criticisms of the film, this odd juxtaposition of black comedy over dark deeds didn’t overly jar for me.

It was more that, unlike other Iannuci material, it couldn’t quite find its footing in a way to be truly humorous. Not as outrageous as Veep, not quite as a smart as In the Loop, it felt more like a watered down Monty Python film.

This goes mostly to the script, which also had some major holes — for example the sub-plot around Stalin’s children. This felt like complete filler without any real merit and would have been on the chopping block from draft 1 for me.

And so, I did something I rarely do — I left the film with about 20 minutes to go. By this point in the film, I was laughing or smiling less and thinking about what I was going to eat for dinner…never a good sign.

While I’m not saying DON’T see this film, if you do miss it, not biggie. When it hits the small screen on one of the streaming platforms, it will be worth a look then.

At least that way if you lose the love for the film as I did 3/4 of the way through, you can flick the switch and watch some reruns of Veep instead…