10. Child 44
The Promise Two modern heavyweights team up behind the Iron Curtain for a hard-hitting adaptation of Tom Rob Smith's hugely compelling best-seller. The idea of a political exile fighting his personal situation and the lie of socialist utopia (where the streets are paved with gold and no crimes are possible) to bring a mass murderer to justice should have been as irresistible as it was on the page. The Problem Though Hardy is okay, the film unfolds in a curiously unfascinating manner. The detection elements should have been some of the most interesting, but there's no intrigue and a harrowing, compelling crime plays out as a boring procedural dipped in brown sludge. It also doesn't help that everyone speaks in the same pantomime Russian accents that Aaron Taylor-Johnson unveiled for his Moscovite Mighty Mouse remake of Quicksilver.