China Salesman Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.0
Audio		3.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.0

China Salesman Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 30, 2018

It may be indicative of the overall production acumen of China Salesman that one of the first mastheads appearing during the credits sequence, in what is a rather long array of production entities that evidently helped finance this film, has a typo in its English version. Instead of “Golden Gun Video”, the viewer is greeted with “Gloden Gun Video”, which some may see as foreshadowing of a sort of certain not ready for primetime quality China Gate ultimately will offer. In the good news department, whoever was in charge of transliteration gets “Golden Gun Video” right two other places, and that may provide at least a little reassurance that there’s some semblance of “sense” in this enterprise, which actually turns out to be a somewhat unusual tale (supposedly “based on a true story”, but you know how that goes) of a telecom industry worker named Yan Jian (Dong-xu Li) who is trying to get a lucrative phone contract in a developing North African country.

The back cover of this release touts “Tyson vs. Seagal”, but in reality both Mike Tyson and Steven Seagal (billed here as “Steve”) are at best tangents to the main story of corporate intrigue in what is evidently the backstabbing world of telecom companies. There’s actually some kind of interesting content here about proprietary information and when it might be morally acceptable to release that information, even if it’s illegal, when releasing it would materially improve the lives of those in less developed regions. Unfortunately, the Chinese filmmakers try to shoehorn in “bits” for both Tyson, who kinda sorta boxes, and Seagal, who talks on the phone a lot before finally engaging in a supposedly climactic showdown, and the mismatch is more of a distraction than anything.

My colleague Brian Orndorf was similarly unimpressed with China Salesman. You can read Brian's thoughts here.

China Salesman Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

China Salesman is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of MVD Visual and Cleopatra Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.22:1. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there's no real technical data on this shoot that I have been able to unearth, but this looks like a competently digitally captured piece that offers rather nice detail levels when lighting conditions allow. The palette is intentionally a bit on the brown side at times, but pops of color do intrude, and elements like a beautiful white gown one of the few female characters in the film wears look bright and well detailed. There's some noticeable banding in scenes of supposed North African skies, but otherwise this is a problem free presentation.

China Salesman Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Once again Cleopatra, a label long associated with music (and therefore one assumes attuned to the technologies of, you know, sound) has provided only a lossy Dolby Digital track on another of their Blu-ray releases. The 5.1 track here does offer some good immersion, not necessarily relegated only to the rather few and far between fight scenes, but with regard to some of the surprisingly bustling activity in the supposed North African locations. It does appear there was a lot of post looping done, and it's almost comical at times how Tyson (whom I'm assuming dubbed himself) has a gigantic mismatch between lip movements and spoken dialogue, which leads me to think there may have been some rushed rewriting in post. That said, dialogue and effects are all rendered cleanly, if without the "oomph" a lossless audio track would have provided.

By the way, our specs don't really have the ability to account for something like this, but there are forced English subtitles in the Chinese language sections (sorry, I'm not expert enough to tell you whether it's Mandarin or Cantonese), but there are no optional English subtitles for the English language sections.

China Salesman Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Slideshow (1080i; 2:10)


• Promotional Featurette (1080i; 1:36) is really more like another trailer.


• Trailers includes China Salesman (1080i; 1:16) along with several other releases.

China Salesman Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

How odd is that a film supposedly pairing Mike Tyson with "Steve" Seagal should be centered on the burgeoning telecommunications industry in North Africa? Well, pretty darned odd, if you ask me, and I kept thinking how really entertaining this film might have been had it been played a little bit more for laughs, rather than with the deadly serious earnestness it is. I have to say the final shot here, which pairs our titular hero with his main squeeze in a certain degree of peril reminded me oddly of the denouement of The Robe, which of course featured Richard Burton and Jean Simmons smiling as they walked off into Heaven to meet their maker. If that isn't enough to pique potential consumers' interest, I don't know what is. Tyson and Seagal are really not the main stars here, for whatever that's worth, but the central story is actually kind of interesting. Video is fine aside from a couple of slight anomalies, but once again Cleopatra has kind of weirdly offered only lossy audio.