BORE AND PEACE - My Review of THE DEATH OF STALIN (2 1/2 Stars) I'm a fan of Armando Iannucci's work. IN THE LOOP and VEEP contain some of the most razor sharp, savage dialogue I've ever heard. His attention to the cowardice of humankind and the terrible ways we often communicate with each other puts him a cut above the rest of the world's satirists. Consider then my relative disappointment with his latest project, THE DEATH OF STALIN. While bracingly funny at times and wonderfully acted by its entire, huge ensemble, the film wore out its welcome, and sometimes its coherence, around the halfway mark. Set in Moscow during the time of Stalin's death, the story explores the insane pile-up of power grabs by those who survived the despot. Not such an easy thing to do in the darkest time of the Soviet Regime, as this wacky comedy has an insanely large body count. Its opening act, and perhaps its best moments, centers around Andreyev, an Engineer (Paddy Considine in fine form) panicking when Stalin directly orders him to record a symphony he oversees. Problem is, the symphony has just ended, so Andreyev quickly rounds up people on the street, a conductor at home in his pajamas, and a hostile pianist (a strong Olga Kurylenko from QUANTUM OF SOLACE) who detests Stalin and refuses to play again. Through this sequence, we feel the fear everyone has of their leader and the brave faces they all put on in order to survive. Eventually, Stalin dies, although in true farcical fashion, it takes forever! The power vacuum left behind gets filled by his surviving cabinet members, all of whom would love to lead their country, despite lacking the moral compass to make something better out of the hell Stalin created. These potential leaders include Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev, Michael Palin, Jeffrey Tambor, a fantastic Simon Russell Beale as a head torturer for the KGB, Jason Isaacs, and the winning one-two punch of Andrea Riseborough and Rupert Friend as Stalin's daughter and son. The film notably eschews Russian accents for the most part, with each actor using their natural speaking voices, most hilariously resulting in Buscemi's Krushchev sounding like a disgruntled NYPD Officer. I also loved how in the background of the frame, we see people being shot, or rolling down stairs, while people carry on petty arguments in the foreground. This sounds amazing, no? And it is for a while. Like his other projects, Iannucci has a real gift for the minutiae of desperate people doing or saying anything they can to stay in the game, or in this case, stay alive. It's like VEEP with a longer running time and bloodshed. But after a while, I stopped caring as an aura of sameness crept into the viewing experience. I stopped trying to follow the convoluted story and occasionally smiled at a well-realized quip or two. THE DEATH OF STALIN is no disaster by any means. It's a fluffy farce which dares to place itself into a dark place in world history. It's got great nervous energy and more plotting and scheming than an episode of SURVIVOR. A shame, however, that it ultimately bored me.