MBunge
If you ever want to get an idea of why American pop culture dominates the globe, watch this film. In all other circumstances flee from it as if this movie were an approaching horde of giant cannibals.This story is supposed to be an international thriller where cops have to race against time to stop an assassination attempt. There have been hundreds of books written and dozens and dozens of movies made about this sort of tale. I'm fairly confident that ever single one of those stories was better than this. Based on a novel, the film concerns a group of white South Africans disgruntled over the end of apartheid. They hire a Russian ex-KGB agent and a black hit man to kill a political leader and set of a race war that would return South African to white rule. Their scheme runs afoul of a fat Swedish detective who resembles John Goodman on Prozac. Teamed up with a black South African detective, they unravel the deadly plot without ever doing a single interesting or exciting thing. Then the movie ends by trying to pretend that it's a true story that just never made it into the news.This film is a rare piece of entertainment in that there's not a single redeeming element to it. The actors are all unattractive and their performances wouldn't pass muster at most community theaters. The plot stinks like a dead skunk. The dialog is boring in at least three different languages. The closest the script ever comes to creating any tension or suspense is when the fat Swedish detective drunk dials his Baltic girlfriend. There's no nudity and the violence is about as compelling as a six year old sticking out his finger and yelling "Bang! You're dead!" Visually, this thing looks like an NBC Mystery Movie from the 1970s… and not one of the good ones with Columbo. The soundtrack just plays the same three bits of instrumental music over and over and over and over.This movie is awful. I mean it's "watching someone else's slides of their trip to the National Tire Museum" awful. If this sort of thing is the competition, there's no mystery to why American movies rule at box offices around the world. I'd rather get my teeth cleaned with a rusty nail than watch this thing again.
Terrell-4
For fans of Henning Mankell's mystery novels featuring the Swedish police inspector, Kurt Wallander... ...for fans of the recent three-story television series, Wallander, with Kenneth Branagh as the Ystad inspector... ...try this Swedish film, The White Lioness (Den Vita Lejoninnan), made in 1996. The movie doesn't have the intricacies, character depth or lengthy and involved plot threads of the book, but come on now. The White Lioness is 500 pages of densely written prose. The movie runs just 104 minutes. In this time the movie manages to pack the basic story line, which is a tricky, serious story about a political assassination, planned in South Africa to take place in Scandinavia, with action, steady detection and style. Equally important, The White Lioness gives us an excellent Kurt Wallander played by the Swedish actor Rolf Lassgard. We have a Wallander who is in his forties, a big, rumpled man edging toward being seriously overweight, especially around the jowls, a lonely man who drinks too much, a cop who is authoritative and respected. Unlike the Branagh version, as good as it was, this Kurt Wallander, while lonely and sad at times, doesn't make such a big deal of it. With Wallander, we're in the middle of what seems to be a puzzle: An attractive real estate agent goes missing and is later found in the boot of a car with a bullet hole in her forehead. Unlike Wallander, we saw it happen and why. Right from the start we know white extremist Afrikaners in South Africa are planning to assassinate somewhere in Scandinavia a major South African leader. We even meet the icy ex-KGB man this group has hired to mastermind the operation. He's called Konovalenko. Jesper Christensen plays him with calm, convincing ruthlessness. We meet Victor Mabasha (Tshamano Sebe), the hit-man who will work with Konovalenko and who finds himself out of his depth. We see the two of them establish themselves in a small, empty house in the snowy countryside outside Ystad. We meet a Cape Town police detective named John September (Basil Appolis) who knows something is happening but not why or how or when. We see a lot of Ystad, a lot of Swedish countryside, all of it cold and covered with the dirty remnants of old snow. We see a good deal of Cape Town, too, and the shantytowns where the blacks must live, even if they're police inspectors. We tag along after Wallander in Ystad and Cape Town, watching him laboriously put the pieces together. On those cold days and cold, cold nights around Ystad, cold murder takes place, The final shootout, with a high- powered rifle versus a car, is so startling and well visualized that we're almost as upset and queasy afterwards as Kurt Wallander was. Just as with the book, The White Lioness is as much a vivid and complicated story of the planning and foiling of an assassination as it is a look at what South Africa had been and, with Nelson Mandela, is on the brink of becoming. The movie is part tricky plotting, part police procedural (interspersed with effective sequences of chases and violence) and part mild political primer. The White Lioness worked so well for me because it gives a fine Kurt Wallander by Rolf Lassgard, thoughtful, smart and probably tied too closely to his job for his own good.
hara192
there is lot to be said for Swedish made for TV film from the 90s. this particular one is certainly doomed by a rather good novel which it is based on. the screen writing follows the novel rather loosely but still tries to incorporate all the locations and characters of the original source and that is where this film does not work. i am not sure if there was a lot of material shot that ended on the cutting room floor or if the script is actually the choice. either way - it makes the plot complicated and not so very straight without adding excitement. some good writing has gone into this but maybe it would have been better to remove it even further from the novel. the editing especially lacks in craftsmanship. performances are rather good, however. one does get the impression though, that filming partly in cape town seemed to be a nice option for everybody. since Mankell is a very! famous author in scandinavia, one cannot help thinking that the team was under the impression that everything they produce is going to be a success.
pksky1
This is a drama about an assassination conspiracy that starts in South Africa that finds its way to a countryside police detective. A woman is found murdered in a rural Swedish house. The murder is not the mystery, the target of the assassin is.The film was rather low budget and the editing is a little hard to follow sometimes. It is especially hard to tell sometimes what country you are in if you only speak English like myself. The movie is subtitled in English and as you cross borders in the movie the change in languages are not always good clues as to where you are. Again, better editing might have helped.Despite that it is an excellent drama and should please any foreign film fan.
