This is a movie about some Russian mobsters in London.<\/p>\n
(Spoiler Alert \u2013 Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)<\/strong><\/p>\n Anna Khitrova is a nurse in the maternity ward of a London hospital.\u00a0 One day a pregnant underage girl Tatiana shows up hemorrhaging and in cardiac distress.\u00a0 We\u2019re shown the needle marks on her arms.\u00a0 She\u2019s rushed into surgery and the baby is saved but the mother dies.\u00a0 Anna finds a diary written in Russian in Tatiana\u2019s possessions.\u00a0 She asks her uncle Stepan to translate the diary but after looking through it he tells Anna not to get involved.<\/p>\n But Anna wants the baby to go back to Tatiana\u2019s family instead of into foster care.\u00a0 She finds a card for a Russian restaurant in the diary and goes there to find out about Tatiana and to get the diary translated to find her family.\u00a0 She meets the restaurant\u2019s owner Semyon a courtly old man and his son Kirill and their \u201cdriver\u201d Nikolai (played by Viggo Mortensen).\u00a0 In reality Semyon is the head of the local Russian mafia family.\u00a0 Semyon tells Anna he has never heard of Tatiana but agrees to translate the diary for her.<\/p>\n Meanwhile we see what Kirill and Nikolai are up to.\u00a0 Kirill has ordered a hit on another Russian mobster and Nikolai helps to \u201cprocess\u201d the body by removing the teeth and cutting off the fingers in a scene that tells you how cold blooded he can act.\u00a0 They dump the body in the Thames but all this was done behind Semyon\u2019s back.\u00a0 Kirill is a loose cannon who acts out of emotion.\u00a0 The murdered gangster has an organization that will be looking for revenge.<\/p>\n Semyon reads the diary and realizes that it implicates Kirill and himself in statutory rape and much more.\u00a0 He orders Nikolai to murder Anna\u2019s uncle because of his knowledge of the diary\u2019s contents.\u00a0 When Semyon\u2019s contacts tell him that a Chechen hit squad is hunting for Kirill but does not know what he looks like he hatches a plan.\u00a0 He decides to elevate Nikolai to a \u201cmade man,\u201d so to speak, in the organization.\u00a0 He is given the \u201cstar\u201d tattoos on his shoulders and knees.\u00a0 And he is invited by one of the organization to a meeting at a bathhouse.\u00a0 It\u2019s a set up for a hit.\u00a0 The two Chechens are told that Nikolai is Kirill and they attack him as he sits in a towel in the sauna.\u00a0 After a harrowing battle in which he sustains numerous knife wounds he kills both hitmen.<\/p>\n At the hospital where he is recovering from his wounds Nikolai is visited secretly by a high-ranking Scotland Yard officer named Yuri.\u00a0 We learn that Nikolai is an undercover FSB agent infiltrating the Russian mafia with the approval of the British government.\u00a0 Nikolai insists that what must be done is arrest Semyon for the statutory rape of Tatiana based on DNA evidence of his paternity of her child.\u00a0 This will allow Kirill to assume titular control of the family but leave Nikolai in actual control to do his work from the inside.\u00a0 Anna finds out that Nikolai did not murder her missing uncle but sent him out of town (Scotland) to hide from Semyon.\u00a0 She now believes that Nikolai is not part of the plot to hide Tatiana\u2019s abuse.<\/p>\n But when the police demand a blood sample from Semyon, he figures out what\u2019s going on and sends Kirill to the hospital where Tatiana\u2019s baby is being held to kidnap her.\u00a0 He intends to drown her in the river.\u00a0 But Kirill is guilt ridden over the idea of murdering the child.\u00a0 By the time he steels himself to commit the murder Nikolai and Anna arrive to talk him out of it and save the child.\u00a0 Nikolai convinces Kirill that his father must be allowed to go to prison in order for the two of them to gain control of the business.\u00a0 Kirill begs Nicholai to believe that he had nothing to do with the Chechen hit squad going after Nikolai and they are reconciled to this new partnership they are forming.<\/p>\n In the last scene Semyon is in prison and Tatiana\u2019s baby has been adopted by Anna.\u00a0 The last image is of Nikolai now dressed as a prosperous business man in the restaurant apparently wondering what has become of his life.<\/p>\n This is a brutal movie.\u00a0 Scenes involving the degrading treatment of the prostitutes in Semyon\u2019s bordello and the graphic violence is disturbing.\u00a0 The depraved nature of Kirill and the various other \u201csoldiers\u201d is depressing to watch.\u00a0 It\u2019s hard to imagine that a government agent would go through all that Nicholai does even if it is the means by which a large criminal organization is destroyed.\u00a0 The depravity and the suffering he goes through is mind altering.\u00a0 Who can I recommend this movie to?\u00a0 Well, not the easily offended.\u00a0 Sexual content and violence are pretty extreme.\u00a0 In addition, I\u2019d say this movie is for people who go in for gangster movies.\u00a0 If you fit into both those categories then this is actually a legitimate film.\u00a0 The acting is mostly very good.\u00a0 Viggo Mortensen does a superb job as the fake hitman.\u00a0 And if action scenes are what you crave then the hit in the sauna is one for the record books.\u00a0 It\u2019s extremely harrowing and effective.\u00a0 Hopefully I\u2019ve spelled out what this movie is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is a movie about some Russian mobsters in London. (Spoiler Alert \u2013 Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation) Anna<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,237],"tags":[1301,408,43,38,1355,3107,3765],"class_list":["post-20738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","tag-crime-drama","tag-gangsters","tag-movie-review","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-russia","tag-viggo-mortensen"],"yoast_head":"\n