Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Major Grom: Plague Doctor’ on Netflix, Where A Russian Cop Beats Back Social Media-Addled Vigilantism

Based on the Russian comic book series, Major Grom: Plague Doctor (Netflix) pits valiant, odd duck St. Petersburg detective Igor Grom against a masked vigilante with violent methods and delusions of grandeur. It’s a mishmash of action, comedy, and comment on contemporary Russian society that takes more than a few pages from Marvel and DC-style story arcs. 

MAJOR GROM: PLAGUE DOCTOR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Igor Grom (Tikhon Zhiznevskiy) is a loose cannon cop. He’s dedicated to keeping the streets of St. Petersburg safe, and bringing justice to the bad guys, but he does it as a lone wolf, to the chagrin of his commanding officer, Prokopenko (Aleksey Maklakov). Out in the streets, the gap between the elites and regular folks is growing ever wider. The bad boy son of an oligarch kills a little girl in a brazen hit and run, and the courts set him free; a banking magnate turns creditors on the working class; and a casino boss deploys bribes to gain control of a landmark building, which he promptly bulldozes to build his gaming house monstrosity. It’s the kind of high-end bad behavior that not even one good cop like Grom can touch, and it’s frustrating. “The law is rotten,” he fumes to Prokopenko. But Igor still does his best to fight the good fight.

Sergei Razumovskiy (Sergei Goroshko) is an elite, too — the technology company he founded has just launched Vmeste (“Together”), a riotously popular new social media platform. But Sergei came from nothing, and was raised in a St. Petersburg orphanage. His vision for Vmeste is to return to individuals their dignity by giving them control over their content. Oleg (Dmitriy Chebotarev), meanwhile, Sergei’s Rasputin-like confidante, takes a more bleak view of society, and how best to clean it up. One night, the oligarch’s offspring is murdered, his sports car detonated in a firestorm, and next up is the banker, blown up in her fancy office high above the city. The targeted killings are the work of a masked vigilante whose look includes a beak-like bird mask dating from the Bubonic Plague and a long cloak worn over a tactical suit complete with flamethrowing gauntlets. He’s the Plague Doctor, and he’s live-streaming his purge over Vmeste.

As the violence escalates, the plague doctor is propped up as a folk hero, doing the dirty work the law can’t, and gaining millions of social media followers in the process. Copy cats start roaming the city in their own bird beak masks, and Igor is no closer to uncovering the vigilante’s identity. It doesn’t help that his bosses have sent in a hot shot FSB investigator from Moscow, Sterlkov (Mikhail Evlanov), who promptly kicks Igor off the case. No matter — this loose cannon was always gonna work it from his own angle, and along the way he enlists the aid of bookish police trainee Dubin (Alexander Seteykin) and Yulia (Lyubov Aksyonova), a vlogger and self-styled investigative journalist. The plague doctor might have designs on taking the law into his gloved hands, but he didn’t count on the determination of St. Petersburg’s real hero.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? A mosaic of Marvel and DC Universe films comes to mind here. The Plague Doctor views himself as a change agent, but he’s driven largely by sociopathy, just like Corey Stoll’s Darren Cross/Yellowjacket in Ant-Man and Michael Keaton’s Adrian Toomes/Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming. And as for his acts of vigilantism conducted in a tactical suit and cloak, even he admits he’s a lot like Batman. “Cooler, though,” he decides with a greasy smirk.

Performance Worth Watching: Tikhon Zhiznevskiy plays Igor as a man wary of everyone, confident in his ability to win any fistfight, and always, always droll to a fault. It’s all very much more subtle than the typical portrayal of a loose cannon cop — more studied than brash — and Zhiznevskiy’s performance lends some gravity to Igor that Major Grom‘s formulaic script doesn’t provide.

Memorable Dialogue: Igor conducts himself with a code in mind, one that gives him license to operate on the fringes of the law if that’s what it takes to bag a criminal. He also keeps the violence in check — he abhors deadly force. “A masked sociopath armed with bombs and flamethrowers is loose in the city, and you want to catch him according to procedure?” Igor asks Dubin. “He’ll burn the city to the ground before I finish all of the paperwork. If I go by the rules to get the bad guys, I’d never get any of them. You know why? They have no rules.”

Dubin acknowledges that Igor’s methods work, but illustrates how much they align him with the very people he’s trying to apprehend. “So what makes you different from them? Yesterday you punched people to get info. What will you do tomorrow?”

“I’ll punch people again.”

“You’re blurring the line between yourself and criminals.”

Sex and Skin: Nothing here.

Our Take: Major Grom: Plague Doctor has the modern look and feel of the MCU or Batman films, and its cast represents themselves well in stock roles — Alexander Seteykin blinking from behind eyeglasses as the rube rookie cop; an underworld informant of Igor’s who is all toothy grins and brute force; Dmitriy Chebotarev as Oleg, glowering in black turtlenecks and whispering his ministrations. (Stay tuned through the credits in this one for more Oleg revelations.) And Zhiznevskiy’s understated take on Igor keeps things strong in the center, even as Major Grom: Plague Doctor starts to spin in neutral, becoming further mired in formula as it tries to connect these characters to the big reveals and fireballs of its finale. And that dawdling ultimately mutes the effect of the film’s last act, since the energy isn’t there to sustain it.

There’s also the matter of the strangely heavy Jesse Eisenberg overtones to Sergei Goroshko’s Sergei Razumovskiy. Razumovskiy is the brilliant, billionaire creator of Russia’s most popular social media platform, as well as an emotionally unbalanced head case with aspirations of megalomania who wears his hair exactly like Eisenberg did as Lex Luthor in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. It almost feels like the actor was given homework: watch Eisenberg as Lex, bring that jittery nature to this character, as there was nothing written to flesh Razumovskiy out. Curious aspects like this subtract from the whole, and knock back Major Grom from where it might have landed with a more fleshed-out picture of what it wants to be.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Expect some derivative content, but the St. Petersburg setting for Major Grom: Plague Doctor is novel, and the stock hero v. villain arc does have a twist or two up its sleeve.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch Major Grom: Plague Doctor on Netflix