The Death of Stalin (2017) *

Directed by:  Armando Iannucci

Starring:  Steve Buscemi, Jeffrey Tambor, Jason Isaacs, Rupert Friend, Andrea Riseborough, Simon Russell Beale. Olga Kurylenko, Adrian McLoughlin, Paddy Considine

The only reason I'm giving this movie one star is it at least has the decency not to saddle its actors with tortured Russian accents.    We have either American or British, thank goodness.   The Death of Stalin is a muddled mess of a movie.    It is supposed to be a satirical look at the power struggle which ensued after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953.    But, what we really have on hand is a confusing movie in which characters shout at each other and behave even more stupidly than the Three Stooges.    Their names end in "ev" or "ov", and no character stands out.    Everyone is sucked into the abyss.  

The point, from director Armando Iannucci (who created HBO's Veep) is that all of these people are buffoons; so much so we can't believe any of them could ever run a vast, powerful nation.    I get the point, but it doesn't make The Death of Stalin any more tolerable.   The movie has five writers to its credit and feels like they were locked in separate rooms and not allowed to communicate.     The Death of Stalin is such a manic free-for-all it feels improvised.    If it wasn't improvised, then maybe it should've been.    The results couldn't be much worse.

The Death of Stalin begins promisingly.    Stalin is alive and well and listens to a Mozart concert on the radio.   He personally contacts Radio Moscow to obtain a recording of the concert.    The concert wasn't recorded, so the Radio Moscow producer (Considine) forces the musicians to play the concert again and keep what's left of the crowd in the building to recreate the event.    It's either that or face possible death just for disappointing Stalin.    These events really don't connect much to the rest of the movie, including the note sent to Stalin by the upset pianist whom Radio Moscow had to bribe to play the concert again.   

A short while later, Stalin falls ill from a cerebral hemorrhage and his underlings scramble to decide what to do next.    Calling a doctor is a challenge because all of the good ones have been executed or imprisoned by the paranoid Stalin, so a group of not-so-great doctors are gathered to break the bad news.    Stalin will die and he does shortly after collapsing on the floor in his office after reading the pianist's angry note.

Then, the backstabbing, power playing, and finagling begin between Stalin's remaining cabinet members.   I won't bore you with the details, nor would I suggest you see the movie to discover them.   Nikita Khrushchev (Buscemi) wishes to push post-Stalinist reforms, while the head of Stalin's security and Nikita's rival Beria (Beale), has ideas of his own.    Then, we have the Deputy Secretary to Stalin, Georgy Malenkov (Tambor), a dope who nonetheless succeeds Stalin because of his position.    The trouble is, each of the these folks is so dim-witted and villainous that we have no emotional stake in who should win out.    We see executions which are pretty bloody, as well as a body set on fire and even a shot inside Stalin's skull during the autopsy.    Lots of alcohol is consumed and people scrambling to ensure a relatively peaceful Stalin funeral.    After enduring all of this silliness, I wished a bomb would have dropped on the Kremlin and wiped everyone out.