Director Xiaolu Xue
Starring Jiayin Lei, Wei Tang, Xi Qi
Rated M
Score 3/6

Following a fatal accident, a Chinese expatriate working for a mining company in Australia discovers that new technology developed by the company may be a health risk and investigates a web of conspiracies in his search for the truth.

For those of you who might be interested The Whistleblower is said to have been the largest foreign production to be filmed in Victoria, Australia since Steven Spielberg’s The Pacific which was released in 2010, and the largest Australian-Chinese co-production in the state.

I do remember vaguely seeing this being advertised at the cinema but not the one I refer to as the friendly neighbourhood cinema, but I never got around to seeing this at the cinema. For those of you who are wondering the cinema only earnt the title of ‘friendly neighbourhood cinema’ because of how close it is to where I live and how many movies I have watched at it over the years.

I really wasn’t familiar with any of the lead actors cast in this or the director Xiaolu Xue’s work though there where a couple of familiar faces cast in this one in the form of John Batchelor & Steve Bastoni. Sometimes when I watch movies cast with actors or directors whose work is completely unfamiliar to me, I often wonder if I’d actively seek their work out based on what I had seen in a given movie. Now, I do admit that I wasn’t overly passionate about The Whistleblower when the credits rolled however, based on what I saw in the movie I would not street clear of another movie based on The Whistleblower.
Also, it should be noted that those of you who might not be fans of subtitles in movies there are a lot of subtitles in this one.
As you would expect with this sort of movie things are a little slow to get going but things start to get going about thirty minutes in, though it doesn’t keep its foot on the accelerator for the rest of the movie. Though there are some brilliantly shot action sequences scattered throughout the movie. With the ending I was left with the sneaking suspicion that there might have been at least one deleted scene that could have helped so that I didn’t feel so lost going into the movie’s climax. I liked the connection that was made to James Gordon’s hero speech at the end of The Dark Knight.