Historians have spent the better part of the last century debating the merits (or lack thereof) of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet premiership, but “Child 44” wastes absolutely no time letting us know that it just doesn’t like the guy.

Unfortunately, “Child 44” wastes an excruciating amount of time doing everything else, mostly squandering a unique, intriguing premise and leaving me wanting to pull out my phone and look at Twitter with half an hour left in the film.

Tom Hardy is Leo Demidov, a Red Army war hero turned high-ranking state policeman in 1953 near the end of Stalin’s reign. After refusing to turn in his wife Raisa (Noomi Rapace) for alleged dissent against the state, the couple is forcibly relocated to a small industrial town out in the Russian boonies.

All the while, some sicko is out there gruesomely murdering children in towns along the railroad line. Demidov (a former orphan) desperately wants to solve the case, but nobody will let him because, as “Child 44” repeatedly tells us, Stalin thinks homicide is a product of capitalist class struggle, and there is no murder in communist paradise.

While this is technically a murder mystery, the main conflict is Demidov’s struggle to exist and do what he feels is right in a secretive, totalitarian society.

“Child 44” regularly pontificates about things such as Stalin’s oppressive secret police and state-sponsored homophobia. Demidov himself was orphaned by a massive famine in Ukraine that many claim was planned by Stalin’s government.

If you’re the kind of person who wants to see this movie out of an interest in Soviet history, just know going in that it is completely unsympathetic to Stalin, and how that affects your enjoyment depends on your personal beliefs.

“Child 44” is at its best when it’s examining day-to-day life in that time and place. Most Western media about this stuff focuses solely on global politics or atrocities, usually forgetting there were millions of regular people just living their lives in the Soviet Union.

It uses small details, such as Demidov needing government permission to take the train to Moscow or a man owning a private telephone, as a tip-off that he works for the state, to demonstrate how wildly different this society was from our own.

It’s so disappointing that the majority of its painful two-and-a-half hour runtime is a slog where precious little happens. The actual murder-solving detective work makes up a grand total of about 20 minutes of footage.

It’s dry, humorless and melancholy without ever providing meaningful payoff. Worst of all, it manages to be painfully boring, despite its great premise.