Alright so this film gets a LOT of flak for being bad. Bad film making. Poorly acted. Poor ADR dubbing/editing. A weak script. Low budget. So be it. I'll give it that. Ben Kingsley is an incredibly underrated actor and his performance alone here makes this film worth watching, particularly because of the wasted potential of his villainous character in Iron Man 3 as The Mandarin. I won't spoil what went wrong in that film for those who haven't seen it, suffice to say that if director Shane Black had taken his character seriously, Kingsley's performance in A Common Man would have delivered a diabolically sinister Mandarin the fans were all expecting to see.
Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley delivers an uncompromising performance as "The Man" a terrorist who plants five bombs around the city of Columbo, Sri Lanka demanding the release of political prisoners from the D.I.G. (Mister DIG) played by Ben Cross, another underrated British performer, in a suspenseful game of cat and mouse. Unfortunately the usually dependable Ben Cross' performance is hampered by bad dubbing and very melodramatic acting but Kinglsey shines in a role reminiscent of his character of hit-man Don Logan in Sexy Beast.
As others have pointed out, there are indeed some audio sync issues as it appears the whole film was ADR'd and lip sync is annoyingly off a little at times (about a frame or two). So it's not the best technically produced film and the acting by the supporting Hindi cast is almost laughably bad at times, but if you want to see Kingsley playing the real Mandarin I suggest you check it out for his performance alone for a glimpse of what could and should have been in Iron Man 3.
Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley delivers an uncompromising performance as "The Man" a terrorist who plants five bombs around the city of Columbo, Sri Lanka demanding the release of political prisoners from the D.I.G. (Mister DIG) played by Ben Cross, another underrated British performer, in a suspenseful game of cat and mouse. Unfortunately the usually dependable Ben Cross' performance is hampered by bad dubbing and very melodramatic acting but Kinglsey shines in a role reminiscent of his character of hit-man Don Logan in Sexy Beast.
As others have pointed out, there are indeed some audio sync issues as it appears the whole film was ADR'd and lip sync is annoyingly off a little at times (about a frame or two). So it's not the best technically produced film and the acting by the supporting Hindi cast is almost laughably bad at times, but if you want to see Kingsley playing the real Mandarin I suggest you check it out for his performance alone for a glimpse of what could and should have been in Iron Man 3.