Jul 12, 2021

Major Grom, Plague Doctor: Time-Traveling Cop versus 1970s Gay Villain


The title Major Grom: Plague Doctor is misleading and grammatically suspect: Major Grom is not a doctor working on the cure for a plague.  He is a loose-cannon cop fighting a serial killer dressed like one of those doctors who treated plague victims during the Renaissance (the long black robe and bird-beak).  Loose-cannon cops, by-the-books partners, and wacko serial killers are terribly cliched, but since this is a Russian movie, it may be spared the "love interest" heterosexism. Plus four reviews don't mention Major Grom getting a girlfriend.  I'll watch until he gets one.

Scene 1: Kids and a dog playing on a beach.  Wait -- they're not playing.  They're going to kill the dog!  An outcast boy intervenes.  

Scene 2: 20 Years Later: Whew, I'm glad that scene ended quickly.  I was about to turn the movie off at minute 1.20.  A man (Tikhon Zhiznevsky, top photo) running down the street in St. Petersburg, chasing a van from which men in cartoon-character masks are throwing money.  The van crashes into a bus. The man jumps inside, and is shot to death.

Scene 3: The solemn funeral (not in the rain!) of Igor Grom,  Inside his coffin, the dead Grom thinks of ways to change the scenario.  He goes back in time and avoids being killed, but the bad guys get away (wow, quite a superpower!). 

He goes back in time again, grabs a garbage truck and crashes into the van.  Success! Nope, they get away again.

Scene 4: In the future, Grom will get a statue for ending all crime in St. Petersburg forever (apparently that van contained all of the criminals in town).  But Grom from the past, chasing the van, crashes his garbage truck into the unveiling ceremony.  Finally he catches the bad guys at the Winter Palace! 


Scene 5:
Dubin (Alexander Seteykin), a kid with glasses and a backpack, enters the vast, ornate Police Protectorate, and gets a tour.  Cops are taking reports from humorous characters.  Grom is asleep in a holding cell.  The captain yells at him for being a loose cannon and destroying half the city (he's apparently unaware of the time-traveling).  Grom points out that he captures 99% of all the criminals in town every day, but the Captain still demands his resignation.  What about Dubin? Isn't he supposed to be the by-the-books partner?

Scene 6: Newscaster Anna Terebkhina in the studio, talking about the bank that the cartoon-character guys robbed.  Turns out that its owner, Olga Isayeva, duped its investors out of millions of rubles (great, two young blond women in starring roles!  They'll be impossible to tell apart).  Next story: the trial of Kirill Gretchkin, son of the famous billionaire Dr. Evil, who ran over a little girl while driving drunk: reckless manslaughter in the U.S., but apparently first-degree murder in Russia.


Cut to the trial.  Was this all just plot exposition?  While Kirill smirks and slurps a soda, a teenager named Lyosha (Oleg Chuganov) breaks down on the witness stand, describing how the drunk driver slammed into the girl, "my only family."  The corrupt judge acquits Kirill; Grom grabs the screaming Lyosha to keep im from attacking. He leaves (darn, I thought he was going to be a major character).





Scene 7: 
A glass-and-steel skyscraper.  Sergei (Sergei Goroshko), a feminine gay stereotype with a gigantic mole on his cheek, is about to unveil his new social media platform, Vimeste 2.0 ("Together").  "What if they don't like it?"  "I believe in you," his boyfriend says. 

Suddenly a news story appears about Kirill being acquitted.  Shocked and horrified, he runs away, chased by thousands of reporters.  Boyfriend helps him hide. 

Scene 8: In his office, Sergei rants about this horrifying injustice.  He feels it personally because the dead girl and her brother were living in the same orphanage that he and his boyfriend grew up in.  "Bad guys keep going free due to the corrupt criminal justice system!  We need a hero!"  

Scene 9: Grom eating pastries with the Chief and his wife, talking about Kirill. I thought the Chief hated him.  The system is corrupt, bad guys go free, we can't follow the rule of law anymore, we have to become vigilantes.  Suddenly he gets a phone call: Lyosha (brother of the dead girl) has disappeared!

Cut to a palatial mansion.  A vigilante dressed as a plague doctor throws Kirill out a window.  He scrambles toward his car.  "Karma's a bitch," Plague Doctor snarls. Flames pour out of his hands and fry Kirill in his car.  Grom watches from a distance.  Not him?  Or, with his time travel ability, is he looking at himself?

He tries to arrest Plague Doctor, but that flame-throwing ability keeps him at a distance.  

Scene 10: Grom at the police station.  The cops are making fun of him. A plague doctor killer?  This isn't Gotham City!  By the way, Grom is un-resigned.

They detained Lyosha as a suspect.  Wait -- I thought he was a little boy? Grom knows that he's innocent.  To prove it, he conducts a lot of research on flame-throwers and plague doctors, and calls all of Kirill's friends and associates.

Scene 11: Night.  Grom buys a taco.  Then he rescues a girl from two rapists and takes her home.  While he's making tea, she grabs the Plague Doctor file and starts photographing. So she staged the rape scene to get an excuse to go into his apartment and research his file?

Yep.  Sounds ludicrous, but she delivers the photographs of the file to the two "rapists."

Scene 12:  Sergei the IT guy from Scene 8 in his apartment, watching tv and fuming, when the Plague Doctor comes in.  He takes off his mask -- it's the boyfriend, Oleg!  Sergei is horrified.

Sergei:  "I wanted justice, but not like this! You killed someone!"  

Oleg: "So?  You wanted him dead, right? So stop the hysterics and don't stand in my way! The fun is just getting started."

I'm out of space, so I'll stop the scene-by-scene recap here.

Beefcake: Grom takes his shirt off.

Other Sights: Some nice exteriors in St. Petersburg.

Heterosexism: Yes, Grom gets a girlfriend.  She's so integral to the plot, it's amazing that none of the reviews mention her.

Stereotyped Gay Villain:  He's actually more of an unstable wacko, like the Joker, with an absurdly outdated psychopathic profile.

Time Travel Ability: Not mentioned after the first scene.  Maybe Grom was just visualizing his options: "Plan A: I'll die. Plan B: I'll get a statue erected to me."

My Grade: D.

2 comments:

  1. To be fair, the Joker is in love with Batman. (And ending all crime forever made me think of Titans Tomorrow.)

    Time traveling cop and they didn't even go the "keep time linear" route. Then again, time travel means, well, have you ever seen Run Lola Run?

    ReplyDelete
  2. The lead actor is handsome and he does get naked...the trailer looks like the Russians can produce slick Hollywood style movies

    ReplyDelete

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