Welcome back to Unceremonious Overqualified Movie Dump Theatre. I hope you enjoyed our previous presentation of the Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence lumber and slumber factory "Serena."

Our latest tribute to potential gone awry, "Child 44," takes us out of the Appalachian wilderness and into the slums of the Soviet Union. Based on the Tom Rob Smith novel of the same name, the Russian murder mystery features an impressively deep roster of stars and talented scene-stealers – Tom Hardy, Jason Clarke, Gary Oldman, Noomi Rapace, Vincent Cassel and Charles Dance – with Ridley Scott in the producer’s chair. However, a few weeks out from its opening day, what was expected to be a wide release ended up getting quietly trimmed down to a mere 510 theaters. A bad omen and unfortunately an accurate one as well, as the apparent lack of confidence from the studio equals a lack of quality on the screen.

A heavily accented Hardy plays Leo Demidov, an orphan turned Russian WWII hero turned MGB agent, devoutly hunting down, interrogating and executing traitors against the state. His job gets much more difficult, however, when his latest case file brings him face to face with his own school-teaching wife Raisa (Noomi Rapace, "Prometheus"). To add to his problems, a killer has been stalking the streets murdering children – a problem considering murder, according to Stalin, is exclusively a capitalist crime. "There is no murder in paradise" goes the common, increasingly half-hearted refrain.

Thanks to the government’s inquiry into Raisa and his growing interest in the child killer case, the disgraced duo is shipped away from Moscow to a small industrial town – where Leo finds yet another murdered child case investigated by the flustered local inspector General Nesterov (Gary Oldman). With the body count constantly rising, Leo, Raisa and Nesterov put it on themselves to solve a case and stop a serial killer that the rest of the Russian government would like to believe doesn’t exist.

Like many of the long-form episodic mysteries made popular recently with "The Killing" (whose grim-faced star Joel Kinnaman shows up here as Leo’s inept sleazeball rival), "True Detective" and podcasts like "Serial," "Child 44" is more interested in what’s going on around the case than the actual case itself. Solving the whodunit is a sidenote (the killer is revealed about midway through, though it doesn’t really matter). The potential tension and drama instead comes from our leads coming up against a corrupt and impenetrable communistic house of lies that insists on not caring, a system that at one point would rather arrest a man for homosexuality than find a murderer.

However, in the clunky hands of director Daniel Espinosa and writer Richard Price (his first screenplay since 2006’s "Freedomland") audiences might find themselves sharing the Soviet officials’ sense of apathy toward the whole ordeal.

Price’s script plays like he adapted the source material without editing as much as a paragraph out, diluting the core conflict with misspent diversions and over-elaborated subplots. The entire first third of the movie seems to pass before the murders arrive, clumsily spending 30 minutes establishing background material that only really necessitates about five. When the serial killer finally begins to strike, "Child 44" oddly still keeps its attention on Leo’s investigation of Raisa, a nonsensical and dramatically flaccid subplot that only exists to get the duo out of Moscow. The goal might be to emphasize the lack of care or attention toward the child murderer, but instead it feels like a movie made of subplots, a bundle of thin, flimsy twigs trying to pass as a sturdy, solid tree trunk.

When Leo and Raisa finally arrive in Nesterov’s jurisdiction – about midway through the 137-minute movie – the murder mystery finally takes center stage, but even so, "Child 44" remains a potboiler that never boils because nobody bothered to put it on the stove. The pacing remains slow and stodgy, and there’s no sense, in the characters or in the movie itself, of the obsession or frustration in fighting a corrupt system inadvertently fostering a killer. It’s a movie as impersonal and devoid of care as the society it’s indicting.

Much of that lies on Espinosa – most known from the 2012 Denzel Washington action thriller "Safe House," a movie whose "No Church in the Wild"-scored trailer had more personality than the final product. For "Child 44," the director drops his bland Tony Scott-hewed competence for bland prestige movie competence. The work is technically fine – appropriately bleak and covered in rubble – but there’s no rhythm or momentum to the picture. It just moves from dull, drably shot scene to dull, drably shot scene, making its 137-minute running time feel on par to walking the length of the Trans-Siberian Railway.

The only times it seems like there’s a person with a pulse behind the lens is during the film’s few unnecessary action sequences, and that’s because that person is shaking the camera like they’re fighting off a wasp while standing on an exercise ball. The mix of choppy edits and shaky camera movements is borderline unwatchable and beyond indiscernible. During one train fight scene, I was positive our protagonist was killed about five separate times. That the final brawl lands in a mud pit (what would a somber Russian story be without some mud wrestling?) doesn’t help with the visual coherence.

As you’d hope with the film’s impressive cast list, at least the performances are decent. Kinnaman plays a fine sniveling goon, and while Oldman struggles a bit with his accent – and his role feels like a disconnected waste – he still brings weight to the character.

And then there’s Hardy, one of our best working actors. He’s stuck battling a dense, occasionally ill-fitting accent – though not as ill-fitting as his uniforms, a detail that in a good film might be meaningful, but in a bad film just comes off cheap and distracting – and some inconsistent characterization. But the actor is still immensely watchable, bringing his signature intensity and compelling commitment to the role, getting at the complicated emotions cracking under his haunted true believer’s gaunt, dark-eyed exterior.

It’s clear to see why Hardy and the rest of the talented cast would sign on to what’s now turning out to be a flop – artistically and financially. The concept at its core – investigating not a murder, but a poisoned Soviet society built on so many crushing lies that the truth might as well be a different language, where upholding the status quo is more important than the actual people living in it – has plenty of potential. A good movie could be made from this idea. It’s just not "Child 44."