Someone looked at the most destabilizing political villain of the 21st century, cast two of the most watchable actors working today, handed the whole thing to a director who made Irma Vep, and somehow made it boring. The Wizard of the Kremlin is now available on VOD, and if you watch it, you will feel every single one of its 137 minutes.
The Setup Sounds Great. The Movie Is Not.
Here is the pitch: Paul Dano plays a behind-the-scenes political operator who engineers Vladimir Putin's rise to power. Jude Law plays Putin himself. Director Olivier Assayas, whose credentials include Personal Shopper and Irma Vep, is at the helm. On paper, this is a can't-miss proposition.
On screen, according to Decider's review, it is a 137-minute plod through tea-soaked conversations that never quite catches fire. The film frames itself as a kind of political origin story, told in flashback by Dano's character Vadim Baronov to an American journalist played by Jeffrey Wright. Baronov, a fictionalized riff on real Putin aide Vladislav Surkov, guides us from the anarchic post-communist chaos of 1990s Russia all the way to the moment a former KGB officer settles into the President's office. You know how this ends. You know it doesn't end well.
How Do You Make Putin Dull? Ask This Movie.
The central question the film poses is genuinely fascinating: how does a country that humiliated itself in the collapse of communism get convinced to hand power to an icy authoritarian? The Wizard of the Kremlin has an answer. It involves reality TV, opportunistic oligarchs, a philosophy called 'sovereign democracy' that Decider rightly compares to 'alternative facts,' and a cynical understanding that power is only ever grabbed or lost, never held in good faith.
That's a rich vein of material. Assayas, co-writing with Emmanuel Carrere and adapting Giuliana da Empoli's novel of the same name, apparently decided the best way to explore it was through scene after scene of people sitting down and talking about it very quietly. Decider counted, or at least felt like they counted, dozens of cups of tea. The review notes that the film positions itself 'in a bland space between the riotous satire of The Death of Stalin and the unsettling drama of The Apprentice.' Which is another way of saying it achieves neither.
What Law and Dano Are Actually Doing Here
The performances are the one genuine point of interest. Dano, playing Baronov with what Decider describes as 'an overly mannered, breathy voice of indeterminate accent,' is making very specific choices that do not entirely pay off. The affectation reads more as distancing than as craft, though the idea behind it, projecting the quiet, almost bureaucratic nature of real political influence, is at least coherent.
Law gets the meatier role in terms of sheer iconography. Putin is the great white whale of prestige drama, and Law apparently projects the flinty menace and barely concealed masculine insecurity the part demands. Decider credits him with a 'frog-faced grimace' that carries genuine threat. The problem is that no matter how good both men are, Assayas seems to have calculated that their charisma alone could carry material that never generates enough dramatic heat to need carrying in the first place.
The Banality of Evil, Minus the Drama
Assayas is clearly playing what Decider calls 'the dramatic banality-of-evil card,' the idea that the most corrosive political forces don't announce themselves with thunder and lightning but seep in slowly through the ordinary cracks of daily life. It is a legitimate and interesting artistic choice. Hannah Arendt would approve of the concept.
The execution, though, is a different story. When your film is about the man who has spent decades destabilizing Western democracy, interfering in elections, and turning the machinery of a nuclear state toward personal preservation, 'banality' should be a formal strategy, not a product of narrative inertia. What Decider describes is a movie that mistakes flatness for restraint, and droning voiceover for depth. At 137 minutes, the difference matters a great deal.
One More Thing Worth Mentioning
The film apparently features rear nudity from Paul Dano. Decider flags this in their review under the heading 'Sex and Skin.' It is, by all accounts, the most surprising thing that happens in the movie.
Alicia Vikander also appears as Baronov's on-again, off-again actress girlfriend Ksenia, a character whose arc Decider describes as 'a fizzling nonstarter.' The review cuts off mid-sentence when assessing her work, which is genuinely one of the funnier editorial accidents in recent film criticism, and also feels like an appropriate metaphor for a movie that never quite finishes its own thoughts.
The Dingo Take
Look, here is what makes this frustrating. The story of how Vladimir Putin came to power is one of the most consequential political stories of the last fifty years. It touches everything: the collapse of liberal democratic optimism after the Cold War, the weaponization of media and spectacle against the populations media and spectacle were supposed to serve, the way a small group of cynical men with money and access can redirect the course of an entire civilization because nobody was paying close enough attention. This is not a small subject. It is one of the biggest subjects there is.
And yet here we are. Assayas and his cast apparently made a film that functions as a cure for insomnia. The Apprentice, for all its flaws, made you feel the physical wrongness of watching a monster get assembled. The Death of Stalin made you laugh so hard at Soviet grotesquerie that the horror crept up on you sideways. The Wizard of the Kremlin, by Decider's account, makes you feel full of tea and vaguely sad that you have 90 minutes left to go.
Putin is, as of this writing, still in power. Still doing exactly what Baronov helped engineer all those decades ago. The least this movie could do is make that feel urgent. Instead it apparently offers a 137-minute reminder that you can have every ingredient for a great film and still serve up something nobody will remember by the time the credits roll. Skip it.
