Mastermind

(r#83)

Banal. Pointless. Pretentious. Not even so bad it's good. Boring. Overlong. Dragging. Stupid. Best of the Wallander series? Who cares? It's not even bad enough to warrant a funny review. I hope this movie dies and burns in hell.

The characters are all 1-dimensional morons. The acting is awful. The actors look like they're reading of cue cards. No one with a brain could enjoy this movie. No one! The movie's shot in a filter that makes every scene dark and ugly. What, they couldn't afford lamps...?

It's a shame that my hometown should get famous through an awful movie such as this one. Avoid at all costs.

One of the best of the Swedish Wallander series. This was a really creepy episode, with lots of surprises. A scene near the ending reminded me a little of 'Silence of the Lambs' but otherwise if was original, and much more like a horror film than some of the others in the series. The basic premise of the plot - revenge - is a very common one for Henning Mankell, but it's the characterisation and acting that are both so strong. I thought Martinnson really came alive as a character in this, with convincing vulnerability. It is so sad that the actress who plays Linda Wallander came to such a tragic ending - she gives a superb performance in this. And Krister Henrikson's Wallander is starting to become the definitive one for me - even over Kenneth Branagh.

I rate this high because the script builds some real suspense. As is the case with most of these, the villain is a really bad guy--psychotic to the nth degree. There seems to be an orchestrated effort to push Wallander to the edge. A series of event are directed at the daughters of cops. We are made aware that Kurt is under surveillance by some evil entity. Things are moved around in his apartment. He is called to crimes which prove to be falsehoods or distractions. His own people begin to doubt his stability. Linda is out to prove something, to outdo others, and she gets quite reckless. Another young woman is kidnapped, her bedroom splashed with blood. The key has to do with a connection among all of these. The downside is one that is recognized by other reviewers. The sloppy, careless, haphazard work of the police. In so many episodes, a little care and common sense would have prevented a great deal of anguish. Yes, there would have been less suspense, but with the right effort, this still could have been accomplished. Once is continually saying, "Are you serious?"

When I watched this movie, I was not only shocked at how ridiculous it was. I was even more shocked that it sacrificed all the believability that usually makes these Swedish versions of the Wallander films so impressive, one of the best series of police procedurals I've ever seen (and I've seen too many to want to discuss it).

After the fact, I learned that this episode had been released first as a movie in theaters, and then things started to make more sense. The overblown absurd dramatics, plus what seemed a bigger budget for effects, look clearly like part of a misguided attempt to sell the series to a larger audience.

The movie is trying to have the visual impact of something like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and doesn't succeed.

The first film in this series, Before the Frost, was also released in theaters, and thankfully is much much better than Mastermind. And at least knowing that Mastermind was trying to be something other than a usual episode in this series helps me understand why it goes so wrong--and helps me be glad that other episodes in the series did not try to repeat the errors made here.

Thank God that I've seen this episode, otherwise I would spend all my life in ignorance, not knowing that Yugoslavian language was spoken in Yugoslavia and that we were overflown with Lothars, Paulinas and Kraftzcyks :D OK, it's just a TV show, it's not a lesson in general knowledge, but I'm sick and tired of all those mistakes considering former Yugoslav countries and now favorite villains - Serbs most of the time, and some Croat now and then. Please, before centering an episode or a whole movie around character from former Yugoslav countries, just google a bit. There were few "Paulina" (extremely rare name here, it's Polish in fact) but only Lothar was Matthaus while he was coaching our football team, and none of the Kraftzcyks (if this surname exists at all, even in Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia)