Wow! With the exception of one or two actors, the level of spoken Chinese is seriously appalling!
shareWas about to say that!
The movie was great, but the WORST part is watching 95% of all the Chinese actors speak "Chinese". Gees, the understand-ability is like 10%, and totally un-naturual dialogues and pronunciation.
Word to the directors: How about do some basic language test before hiring them? Or dont speak Chinese next time.
I can say the same about "Russian" Russian mobsters spoke.
Some of them were native Russians, but other than that Russian in this movie was appalling as well (dialogs were arguably good but pronunciation just awful).
I thought Jason Stathum did rather well, you could hear his accent, but he did good (compare to the "Russians" in Avengers for example)
Esse Quam Videri
Keep in mind that the movie was not made for native Chinese speakers. For those of us who do not speak Mandarin, we read the subtitles and the words bleed together. I'm sure you guys have watched Chinese movies were the characters speak English and you can't understand them.
However, I do think that they could take the time to hire speech coaches to help the actors. There was a show called Undercovers where the main characters were spies in a different country almost every episode and from what I understand their accents were usually spot on.
To me, with the exception of one or two that spoke pretty good Mandarin all the Chinese actors spoke Mandarin as their second or third language.
share...who could speak fluent Chinese or Russian.
shareHilarious!!
These Triad gangsters and Russian mobsters ought to have, in addition to their MBA, a mastery of their native tongue acquired from roaming the streets, dens and lairs.
I don't know the two languages, so I don't know how "street" their lingo were portrayed.
... used Chinese and Russian actors for those roles. I know Russian and the accents were very thick, which happens when the language is not the native for the speaker and they had to learn few phrases for a movie role.
shareMost of the older Chinese actors in Hollywood speak Cantonese. Mandarin... Not so much.
shareIt is likely because the Chinese characters either don't speak Mandarin--there is no such language as "Chinese"--or their first language was Cantonese, or they aren't not ethnic Chinese.
share