At once wild and hopelessly clunky, this prospective pan-Pacific blockbuster about skulduggery in the mining industry proves far less notable for what it has to say about business than for the kind of business it represents. A Chinese-Australian co-production, Xue Xiaolu’s thriller aims to sell back to the west what traditionally gets exported east: pricey locations, filled with actors from both countries of origin, one in 10 of whom speaks English with any degree of naturalness. Watching it is like trying to interpret a trade agreement run through Google Translate; what money can’t buy, in this instance, is coherence or finesse.
The plot doesn’t so much trot as lurch violently around the globe, jettisoning logic at each turn. It opens in a Malawi composed of equal parts stock footage and green screen, where doughy middle-aged hero Mark (Jiayin Lei) is assigned to manage the aftermath of a gas explosion and strays with old flame Zhou (Tang Wei, a long way from Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution). A Chinese layover establishes a boardroom cover-up and Zhou’s apparent death in a plane crash. Thereafter, we’re off to Melbourne for a Bourne-style runaround, with Mark pursued by Ross Kemp-alikes for intel that hasn’t been properly established. Here at least Xue looks more assured, assisted by the car-smashing expertise of former Fast & Furious crew: their top-dollar write-offs require no dialogue or explanation.
Codswallop though it is, The Whistleblower retains a sort of energy for an hour, refusing to travel in any of the expected directions; the avenues it does pursue – the hero’s past as a rower, his wife’s VFX career – make no more sense than anything else. The Whistleblower starts to feel needlessly woolly by the end, and British viewers may find one particular script quirk impassable. Much as the 1999 Ashley Judd vehicle Double Jeopardy never recovered from naming its villain Nicholas Parsons, Xue’s film suffers from laundering its onscreen moolah through the accounts of one Tom Baker. The film is so wackadoo you wouldn’t be surprised if the fourth Doctor materialised somewhere en route to claim a payday.
• The Whistleblower is released in the UK on 6 December and in Australia on 12 December.
