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The White Lioness

The White Lioness

List Price: $19.95
Your Price: $17.96
Product Info Reviews

Features:
  • Color


Description:

The third of a series of Swedish mysteries featuring small-town Police Inspector Kurt Wallander (based on the novels of Henning Mankell), this one drops the doughy, middle-aged crime solver in the midst of an international conspiracy. It all starts in South Africa, when a pro-apartheid conspirator sends a gaunt, steely-eyed former KGB assassin (icy Jesper Christensen) and a black hit man to Sweden to train for a unnamed killing. The sleepy little town gets a jolt when their hideout is destroyed in a fireball and the remains found in the ashes--a precision firearm, a sophisticated, high-powered radio, and a severed human thumb--lead Wallander back to South Africa. The scenes of beefy Nordic Wallander in a sea of black faces, appalled at the poverty and a little out of his element but always the egalitarian Swede, are among the best of the movie. Rolf Lassgård plays Wallander as a modest, amiable everyman and a dogged investigator tossed into an extreme situation, fumbling at a shootout and clumsily giving chase through frozen city streets but never shirking duty or danger. Director Pelle Berglund sets a deliberate, at times dawdling pace hampered by obscure side trips into Wallander's private life, but fills the film with a combustible conspiracy and terrific characters, notably Christensen's arrogant, icy killer and Basil Appollis's cool, charismatic South African police detective, John September. --Sean Axmaker
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