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Purely Joyful Movie!

People are voting emotionally.

One of my all time favorites.

Absolutely the worst movie.

If you enjoy reading Henning Mankell, you'll love this. The characters felt real and the plot unfolded just as I hoped it would. I also think the screenplay writer did an amazing job of bringing the screenplay down to a manageable size, otherwise this two part mini-series would have gone to more than six hours.This adaptation captures the original feelings and focus of the novel, the actors did a good job, and the director had a firm grasp of the material and how to best present it.I completely enjoyed watching this in one sitting, and the slightly more than 3 hours just seemed to fly by. I have no hesitation recommending this to you at all.Now I'm looking forward to rereading the novel again, followed by another viewing of the film.

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?

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! ;)

This film is made up of spare parts, but it's still an improvement on the book. It appears that, in turning a book into a movie, it is possible to substitute good acting and production values for sloppy writing. The first 20-odd pages of the book were well-done, and that is replicated in the film. The first 30 minutes or so show a horrific murder scene, and introduce two good, well-acted female characters clashing over the investigation. Near the end of that sequence, the Chinese connection is made, and all credibility goes out the window. The evidence of a Chinese connection is frail & tenuous, but, OK, the scene shifts to Beijing, where we meet a comic-book Chinese villain who is, of course, ruthless, wealthy & powerful for no apparent reason. Actually, "ruthless" can be explained-for the story's purposes-by a violent, xenophobic assault suffered by his father when he was laying track for American railways in the 1860s. This wealthy & powerful guy is maybe 40-45 years old? You do the math. Fortunately,the filmmaker,who is Austrian, opted to omit the book's section set in Africa, which contained some real howlers, and he chooses to end it with the central figure, a Swedish judge, arriving safely back in Stockholm. One peculiarity of this film that can't be blamed on the book's author is the treatment of language. For the US print, of course, the subtitles are in English, but in spite of the settings, i.e., Sweden, China, and very briefly the US, every character on screen speaks German. The Chinese characters are dubbed in German, the lone American character actually speaks good German, and all the Swedes speak serviceable German. Maybe it was made for Austrian TV. Whatever the reason, it was jarring to see Chinese characters, in a subtitled film, delivering lines in German. Another good reason to avoid the scenes set in Africa.