It’s close to an hour into “The Wizard of the Kremlin” before Vladimir Putin (Jude Law) shows up, but as soon as he does, exuding a calm whiplash anger and threat, he brings the movie into laser-like focus. Law, with burning eyes and a tight grimace, plays Putin by taking total command — of whatever room he’s in, and of the movie. He asserts himself with a feral decisiveness rooted in animal cunning.
The way Law plays him, Putin is something almost scarier than a monster — a rational tyrant, a man to mess with, or even disagree with, at your peril. He doesn’t start out by coveting power (the powers that be have come to him), but he believes that raw power, from the top, is what the Russian people crave. He may be right. (In one scene, we’re told that when asked in a poll to name their favorite leader, the Russians still choose Stalin.) I wish that Law didn’t play the role with his gruff Cockney-inflected British accent — it would have been better if he’d adopted a Russian accent, to capture more of Putin’s brusqueness. Yet he perfectly channels Putin’s cold-blooded glare, infusing him with a reptilian charisma. The real Vladimir Putin has a special duality: His eyes look like they want to kill you, his mouth doesn’t move a muscle. And Law nails that. His Putin explains that he’s going to restore the vertical authority that’s gone out of Russia — an ominous message. Yet whenever he’s onscreen, we actually like Putin, because he’s such a shrewdly concentrated gangster-autocrat. We always want to see more of him, not less.
