It’s also very much the Kenneth Branagh show. Does he know how to question witnesses tactfully? No. Does he wait until all the innocent fairground goers leave the fairground so he can arrest some dangerous armed carnie-folk who don’t know he’s coming? No. Does he know how to conduct proper surveillance? No. Okay, Ken knows how to hold a gun, but does he bother to provide descriptions of potentially escaping trucks with an armed driver? No. Kurt goes around by himself, doing immensely stupid and dangerous things that no sane police officer would do and which are massively counter-productive to proper policing. Rest assured, in modern Sweden, as with the UK, there are ATMs everywhere, cheques are accepted almost nowhere so few people carry them with them, and almost nobody will have an out of date credit card with them, no matter how disorganised they are.Įven so, it still feels like a police show that obeys the old Buckley’s Crime Show Hypothesis because absolutely no one behaves as if they have even a passing acquaintanceship with any kind of police procedure – and doesn’t think we’ll notice. So despite the presence of CCTV cameras in the plot, it’s relatively easy to spot that the story was written at a time when ATMs weren’t that common in Sweden, and people genuinely could forget to bring their current bank card with them so be forced to write a personal cheque in a bank for cash. Problematically, this feels like exactly what it is: a slightly poor attempt to update a slightly old (1991) book for modern times. It’s a story that is basically a giant red herring for most of the episode, followed by a stupid revelation that should have been spotted within the first 20 minutes of the story if some competent police officers were at work. Looked on as a detective story, this adaptation of The Faceless Killers is pretty hopeless. The fallout from the case leads Wallander to doubt everything, including his abilities as a police officer. A police leak of the wife’s dying words leads to an outbreak of racist reprisals in Ystad. Wallander investigates the brutal slaying of an elderly couple at an isolated farmhouse. Now it’s back and everyone seems just a little bit more hopeless than ever. Remember The Fast Show? There was a character, a zookeeper, who seemed perpetually surprised by his job.Īnd so it is with Wallander, the detective show starring Kenneth Branagh as the miserable Kurt Wallander, in which all the detectives and even the police officers seem perpetually surprised by the fact people do bad things. (Mar.In the UK: Sunday 4th January, 9.30pm, BBC1/BBC1 HD. Also, American readers may find odd Mankell's bundling of his upright anti-racism message with broad notions of what constitutes acceptable social control. But he provides essential information only at the last minute, which makes the solution feel more like an appendix than a conclusion. Mankell is clearly a skilled writer, and his portrait of Wallender (who periodically slides beneath respectability) is effective. However, a leak to the press complicates the investigation by arousing anti-immigrant feelings, some of which are expressed in anonymous threats. Wallender puts those clues on the back burner when he learns that Johannes, ostensibly a simple farmer, had a secret life involving wealth and connections unknown to his wife. Rydberg, a police force old-timer, says the noose's unusual knot and the word foreigner, which Maria uttered before she died, are important. Such consolations can't help him absorb the scene at the Lovgren farm, where elderly Johannes Lovgren has been brutally beaten and stabbed to death and where his wife, Maria, is found barely alive with a noose around her neck. Since his wife walked out on him, Kurt Wallender, a middle-aged cop in the small town of Lenarp, has drowned his sorrows in opera and far too much liquor. In his first appearance in English, Swedish bestselling author Mankell combines thriller-quality entertainment with a depiction of anti-foreigner prejudice in Sweden, painted here as a very chilly place indeed.
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