Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

Murphy Howard I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Keira Brennan The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de) "Der Chinese" or "The Chinese Man" or "The Chinese" or "The Man from Beijing" is a German television movie / mini-series that consists of two episodes of 90 minutes each. It is one of the more known works by director Peter Keglevic. The screenplay is by father and daughter Breinersdorfer, who adapted a Henning Mankell novel here. It is a small screen movie from 2011, so this one had its 5th anniversary last year. It is basically all about Suzanne von Borsody and I am not sure she is good enough to carry this film for such a massive runtime. Michael Nyqvist, Claudia Michelsen and Jimmy Taenaka have some screen time too and they may be the most known cast members here. I personally like Nyqvist, but sadly the material he was given here was just not good enough for him to truly make a difference. With the exception of the Asian actor in the center of it all, everybody just felt like a vehicle for von Borsody and the fact that she did not receive any awards attention at all says that they should have gone for another actress probably as the character was surely as baity as it gets.This is the story of a female judge who finds her family murdered by a mysterious Asian male. It clearly is something personal in here. The entire film then is about her getting to the core of the problem and many flashbacks are included that lead us back many centuries and explain the background and motivation behind these murders. Now I think there are some good moments and this one here certainly gets better the longer it goes. The second 1.5 hours were certainly better than the first as honestly the only somewhat memorable aspect of the first 90 minutes is really the ending with the broken glass and it's a nice indicator of the rise in quality about to happen. But still overall, I was disappointed here. I think at 90-100 minutes with focus on the right scenes this could have been a really good outcome, maybe even a ****/***** with a better lead actress. But the path they too was just not right. It's overlong, shoddy in terms of focus and plot on quite a few occasions and there are characters in it that just add nothing to the film except duration, maybe necessary to reach the 3-hour mark (or come close to it as it's actually a couple minutes shorter). So yeah, while there are a handful strong moments, I must say that the negative outweighs the positive and as a consequence I give this film a thumbs-down. Not recommended. Or not enthusiastically at least. Unless you have an interest in a mix of Chinese/American history as this area is one where it somehow taught me something new really, even if there is also no elaboration in depth about the railway workers discrimination, apart from throwing in that it existed. Just one example of how the basics are good for this film, but the details and in-depth elaboration leave a lot to be desired. Watch something else instead.

abisio The first absurd thing about this Swedish TV Movie is the English title; instead for The Chinese, they called The Man from Beijing; even when the Chinese part happens in Canton. The movie starts promising a lot of people (about 19) killed by a sword in a small Swedish town. All belonging to the same family. A female judge blood related with the family goes to the town to find out what happens. Well that takes about 10 minutes to develop but the movie stretches the plot for almost 90 minutes by filling with unnecessary scenes, long and empty dialog and some back flashes of something that happened 165 years ago. It is around the 90+ minutes mark that something interesting (but really absurdly handled) happens. End of Chapter 1. Chapter 2 then moves the action to Canton and things go for worse. Nothing makes sense and the motives are not even believable by the characters. The subplot about corruption has little to do with the rest of the movie. I do not know; perhaps Chinese got a different version more focused on more interesting matters; but this one is really boring and makes very little sense.Even great actors like Michael Nyqvist (the original from the Girl with the Dragoon Tattoo can do anything on a character so underwritten that is almost non-existing). In brief; unless you want to have a nap with the TV on avoid it.

ikanboy Everybody speaks German, even the Chinese and Yanks, but they're supposed to be speaking Swedish. The plot is over the top and riddled with ludicrous plot holes. 19 people get slaughtered in one village, some 4-5 at a time and they arrest a guy playing music in one of the houses who has no blood on him, and who stuck around? The bad guy gets shot 2-3 times, yet manages to leave the country? Our heroine chases him to china....to do what exactly? When she finds him she runs. She gets her purse stolen but returned by a stranger who knows she is Swedish and speaks the language, and she doesn't catch on? Worst of all Michael Nykvist gets to do nothing but act as concerned husband. The Swedish cop insists on fingering an innocent despite mounting evidence to the contrary, until he commits suicide, then she admits he's innocent. Who vetted, or didn't this crap?

Jim Greulich I will start by saying that I am a big fan of Swedish film (both movie & TV), as well as loving some of Mankell's other screen adaptations... mainly the Wallander series' (Swedish version). So, by seeing Nyqvist 2nd billed (one of my favorite Nordic actors), Mankell, the production company and main filming location... I naturally expected most of the spoken language to be Swedish. You can imagine how shocked I was when they started up in German! For me, this was very difficult to adjust to. German is a very harsh language to listen to (and I am part German) but more than that, it simply did NOT make sense to have the entire film spoken and dubbed in German. I found myself trying to figure out who was really speaking and who was being dubbed so much that I ended up missing a lot of the English sub-titles. For the record, I don't speak SE or DE... only know a few words in each language. So what I THINK i finally figured out was this... the German actors were speaking German, the Chinese actors were probably speaking Chinese but were dubbed in German (really freaky). What was baffling to me was Nyqvuist... at first it seemed his lips were matching the German being spoken, but then later it did not seem to match up, and to be honest, it didn't sound like his voice to me. I would have to guess then that he was actually speaking Swedish and they dubbed in the German. Just an overall disaster language wise and it really did detract from the movie, at least for me. Without this, I would have easily given this 8 stars as the plot & acting was excellent, as well as some stunning location filming... especially in Stockholm, one of the world's most spectacular looking cities! I'd say that this is well worth a watch for any fan of crime thrillers, Mankell, or just good solid foreign films. One really funny thing I noticed in one scene... you had Nyqvuist, Borsody (the lead character), and a Chinese actor having a 3-way discussion. If my assumptions were correct, they were speaking 3 different languages through the entire scene... that must have been a very bizarre situation indeed! ;)