"The Wizard of the Kremlin" is a slow-drag chronicle of the rise of Vladimir Putin in the wild-west days of post-Soviet Russia. (Those unfamiliar with this period might want to do a little Wikipedia catch-up before braving the film.) The story begins in Moscow in 2019, with a political schemer named Baranov (Paul Dano) relating his many years of behind-the-scenes governmental machinations to a visiting American academic named Rowland (Jeffrey Wright). Twenty years have passed since the collapse of the old Soviet Union, and in that time Baranov has risen from a youthful involvement in the arts (he was an avant-garde theater director and later a TV producer) to a role as a powerful adviser to the country's current top dog, former KGB officer Vladimir Putin (Jude Law).

Casting the elegant Jude Law to play the dour and thuggish Putin, a character who's been haunting Western media for the past quarter-century, sounds like a case of wildly misjudged casting. Surprisingly, though, it works, and very well. Law bears no physical resemblance to Putin, but he gets all the details of the man's presence — the gimlet-eyed stare, the tightly coiled air of menace — just right. The usually excellent Dano, on the other hand — playing a fictionalized version of an actual Putin adviser named Vladislav Surkov — appears to have been given none of the encouragement by director Olivier Assayas ("Personal Shopper") that might have spurred him to grab the picture by the neck and kick some life into it. His Baranov inhabits the screen like a puddle of tapioca, and his whispery, borderline-lifeless narration and line readings (he's both star and storyteller) practically smother our interest. The movie's two-and-a-half-hour runtime doesn't help.

Along with being too long and too slow, the movie is wearyingly repetitive. To convey the brazen spirit of the unleashed oligarchs of the new Russia, Assayas leads us through glittering party rooms and underground nightclubs of a very same-y sort, all filled with festive wheeler-dealers (among them a sharp-witted young woman named Ksenia, played by Alicia Vikander, who eventually marries Baranov, but is otherwise underwritten). We get the idea of all this: We're watching people set free from a deadening society — there's exhilaration in the air. But we can also feel the furious clampdown heading their way. As one character notes, the Russian people's all-time most admired leader is still the brutal dictator Joseph Stalin. And now Putin, a man who like Stalin lusts for nothing but power, is waiting in the wings.

The movie is based on a well-regarded 2022 novel by Giuliano da Empoli. The book was published in French, but the actors in Assayas' film, among them Tom Sturridge and Will Keen, all speak English (happily, without corny fake-Russian accents). This adds to a faint haze of disconnection that hovers over the film. Cinematographer Yorick Le Saux's wintry images of a snow-blanketed Latvia (where the movie was shot) and his burnished period interiors gently suggest that we're not in any of the usual West European film locations. But where are we? And who are all these people? (An overabundance of characters precludes much in the way of character development.)

The most pressing question of all, however, is this one: When will Vladimir Putin get some respect on the world stage he's starting to bestride?

"The Americans," he grumps, "they treat me like I'm the president of Finland."

Photo courtesy of Vertical Entertainment