How do you make a biopic about Vladimir Putin, the ogre of our current news cycle? If you’re Patryk Vega, you hammer it together with such reckless abandon that you’d think you’d stumbled into a Cold War-themed escape room designed by circus clowns. Nobody expects nuance, perhaps, but nobody expects this—a cinematic vodka shot that leaves you not so much woozy as existentially seasick. This is not the movie Putin deserves; it’s the movie assigned to late-night cable purgatory, a cautionary tale for future film students and insomniacs alike.
If the trailer promised the iron-fisted grandeur of a Shakespearean tyrant, the film delivers something closer to a Reddit meme stitched together on a malfunctioning iPad. The “plot”—if I must dignify it—sprawls across Putin’s life like a tangle of old extension cords: we cut from bullied child to KGB dandy to shirtless horseback czar so quickly it’s as if the edit was powered by Russian roulette. Some transitions are less “cinematic” than “convulsive.” We don’t trace a life; we get a series of half-remembered anecdotes, napkin-scribbled between shots of cheap vodka.
And then there’s the CGI. Oh, the CGI! Instead of a face, our digital Putin wears a mask of near-human confusion, by way of PlayStation—circa 2010—and not even the expensive kind. If ever a movie cried out for the pleasures of flesh and blood, it’s this parade of waxen avatars. Here, we don’t get De Niro’s weight or Brando’s mystery; we get the uncanny valley by way of the Moscow subway. The effect is less “empathy” than “Halloween store returns policy.”
Surrounding this waxwork, the supporting cast bustles in and out of focus, each character as sharply defined as a snowstorm in Smolensk. Dialogue is barked, whispered, or simply left to drown in the haphazard sound mix. I’m convinced some of these subplots were crowd-sourced from lost TikTok videos. There’s a parade of forgettable ministers, loyalists, enemies, wives and mistresses—each so unmoored from the rest that you wonder if the casting call was announced during karaoke night.
Of course, Vega aims for something more. There are “themes”: power, destiny, sacrifice, and the old chestnuts of Russian suffering—just enough “symbolism” to bore a lit class into early retirement. We get recurring motifs—bullies, fur hats, icons glinting in the background—telegraphed so shamelessly you want to pat the film on the head and ask if it’s feeling all right. The religious overtones swing in and out like the world’s least subtle church bells, as if Vega hopes Christ himself might emerge from a golden haze and bless the final cut.
I watched, slack-jawed, hoping for the satirical bite of The Death of Stalin. Instead, Putin staggers in the opposite direction, delivering jokes that land with the subtlety of a piano dropped from the tenth floor, if they land at all. The movie wants to be clever, but can’t tell a wink from a nervous tic.
Visually, it’s a hodge-podge of faux-epic shots and gaudy digital tricks. The camera glides, swoops, and then collapses, apparently forgetting what emotion looks like. Grand halls, mournful snowscapes, smoky bars—the palette is there, but it’s colored with entropy. By the third act, you want to reach for the remote, or simply appeal to the Geneva Conventions. Your eyes glaze, your brain rebels, your soul packs a suitcase and heads for the dacha.
This might have been a compelling study in modern evil, a Godfather for our troubled times. Instead, we have an overcooked, underwritten, visually repellent crash-course in how not to film a monster. The pacing plods, storylines vanish into the steppes, and not a single character seems to realize they’re stuck in a biopic disaster zone. If there were any poetry here, it’s been stamped out by plot contrivance and shoddy direction: the film’s only real arc is the descent—scene by scene—into chaos.
In the end—if “end” is the word for this kind of narrative sputtering—the main emotion the film elicits is disbelief. This is the story of a man who bends nations to his will, reduced to a clumsy shamble through history’s prop closet. You want insight, but get an IKEA manual translated three times by Google and once by a bored teenager. The only lesson: sometimes all the power in the world can’t save you from a bad screenplay and nihilistic visual effects.
See Putin if you like existential pain. See Putin if you’re curious what happens when cinema gets lost in its own digital snowdrift. Or better still, stay home with a real Russian novel and feel history’s chill the way it’s supposed to be felt—on the skin, not with a thousand pixels taped into a suit.
This is not cinema, it’s cinematic purgatory. Cheers to Vega for daring to try, but in the end, Putin is a film only a mother—or a captive audience—could love, and even they might file for emancipation halfway through.
