China Salesman (2017)

Simply Perfect

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

The artwork for this film made me interested. I mean here we have a picture of not just famed boxing legend Mike Tyson to look at but action star Steven Segal as well. A movie with the pair in it? Potentially facing off against one another? Sign me up! The movie arrives, I pop it in the machine and low and behold within the first 20 minutes or so the clash takes place. And...that's about it. A few minutes of the two going at it mano a mano and then we're left with the rest of the movie to deal with. And it's bad. Really bad.I went back after watching about half of the film and read some reviews others had posted elsewhere. Had I done so prior to starting the film I might never have watched it. Everything stated in those reviews ended up being dead on.The film has an extremely convoluted plot going here. It takes place in some small African country in the middle of trying to figure out which cell phone company to handle the needs of that country. Yes, it's like a movie about ATT and Verizon battling it out with as much excitement as that brings to mind. At the same time Tyson is the last member of his tribe trying to take over the country. Segal is a bar owning dealer of weapons and warriors. Both have perhaps the least amount of screen time among the main cast members. I could go into the different factions trying to this contract that comes down to a Chinese group and a French one but honestly their tech talk became so boring that I found myself just trying to stay awake and watch the movie. On top of that they use of subtitles for foreign films is nothing new to me and I normally have no problem with it. But in this case the dialogue was so fast and the subtitles so miniature that I had to literally sit a few feet from the screen just to read them. On the plus side the film is very well shot and edited. Kudos to those involved on that end. And the promised though short lived fight between Tyson and Segal was fun to watch if over the top. Punching through pillars, kicking tables in half and nearly missing one another throughout the fight was outrageous fun. But other than that the movie fell flat. I honestly can't recommend this movie. I mean if it shows up on cable or if you have a service that shows it sure, watch it for that fight sequence. But then find something more interesting to do like clean out belly button lint.

Yan Jian, a young Chinese IT engineer who volunteers to go to North Africa and help the company he works for to win a competition. The winner can own the right to control the communication between south and north. French spy Michael works for the West. His boss ordered him to go to the North Africa and win the competition, and they can control the great mineral resources of Africa. Describing how awful 'China Salesman' is and is beyond imagination that even after reading the title and see Seagal and Tyson in the Poster you can understand that we're talking about pure garbage fire which it is.

This is a fun action movie that throws in a lot of comedy. The storyline is actually pretty clever, with a weird twist that i didnt expect. Surprisingly Tyson and Segal seem to have good chemistry on screen together. Big budget fun movie.

Well, the Chinese movie investment did it again, they overlooked a very bad screenplay, casting lot of deadbeat no-talent at all low level actors to play the bad people, watching these non-actors poor performances, I suddenly found Steven Segal and Mike Tyson were actually a pair of pretty good actors in this laughable film. Both of the two leading Chinese actors were also lousy actors with awkward and pretentious performances, the male actor also had a funny Korean style hairdo, that was covered up his forehead with hairs combed down below his eyebrows, this sissy hairstyle is the typical disgusting hairstyle widely used by those sissy looking Korean young actors or singers and blindly copycatted by the Chinese young entertainers. I just felt very uncomfortable to watch a Chinese high tech guy would have a funny Korean hairstyle.Anyway, this is a very shallow movie, blindly invested by those Chinese deep pockets. They thought making the African locality and background setting was a cool and exotic choice that would sell to the Chinese moviegoers easily. But with such a poor screenplay and poor cast, all I could concentrate is the African scenes, the streets, the African people, the desert, the camels, the palm trees and the SUVs....