I gave it a 7.5 out of 10

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Like the man said you can't go home again and in most cases you shouldn't even try but as we all know Michael Caine is so afraid of winding up broke he'd even black up to play a spear carrier in a remake of Zulu. Although Caine is still the Harry Palmer of The Ipress File, Funeral In Berlin etc, Len Deighton didn't write so much as FADE IN on this one and all I can say is he must have got some serious wedge for the use of his creation. The plot, if you can call it that, needn't detain us, suffice it to say there is lots of shooting, blowing up and stuff of that ilk and about once every other Fall you can actually tell who is who and what side they're on. See it if you must.

Playing Harry Palmer, the most boring secret agent ever presented on screen (can't say if he's that boring on the books), Michael Caine has the mission of tracking down the formula of a nuclear weapon that is about to be delivered to North Korea by the Chinese. And Palmer is not working for his British comrades that decided to retire the man, but yes for the Russian, in the post Cold War scenario.Has to be one of the most uninteresting and weak developed spy films I've ever seen. Nothing so exciting happens, the plot is contrived, simplistic and dull, with nothing to say, dopey as hell. Gotta have some real nerve to enjoy something lifeless like this. In one of his weakest performances but not to the point of going to the Wall of Shame (like "Jaws 87"), Michael Caine is helpless in playing a character that isn't appealing like James Bond or clever and real as George Smiley. Jason Connery, Mia Sara, Michael Sarrazin, Burt Kwouk and Michael Gambon, they all didn't have much to do with a script that leaves somewhere to go nowhere.The more it reaches the end the worse it gets, and the only good moment out of "Bulllet to Beijing" is a sequence involving a car chase where Caine and Connery's son need to get in time to catch the Express train to Beijing. What a delightful way to waste your precious time. 3/10

Michael Caine slips comfortably and amusingly into one of the most famous roles of his career, Harry Palmer (AKA the anti-Bond), after a 30-year break. The film itself is both pleasingly old-fashioned (much of it takes place on a train, by far the most traditional means of transportation in this genre), and successfully updated to be relevant in the mid-1990s, post-Cold War era, where spies from all over the world are suddenly labeled "redundant" by their governments. And yet, the murky, complicated games of espionage still go on, only with new objects and new players now (but old friends and old enemies as well). The story is slightly meandering in the middle but it has its surprises too, and the film is well-produced (especially for a TV project); the relatively (in comparison to James Bond) small scale of its action sequences generally works in their favor. It's been a long time since I last saw the final theatrical Palmer film, "Billion Dollar Brain", but I think "Bullet To Beijing" is superior to that one at least. **1/2 out of 4.

I first broke into the Harry Palmer series when I thought Midnight in St. Petersburg sounded like a good film in the TV guide, and it had Michael Caine in it. Since then (realising there was more of it)I've become quite a fan of the series, not really minding if it was the vintage 60s or the modern 90s.Bullet to Beijing was the fourth film out of the five that I've seen (I've yet to see the somewhat rare Billion Dollar Brain) and I thought it was a good film, certainly worthy of at least a 6.5 rating on IMDB. I know fans of the vintage 60s were somewhat opposed to this even being made, because it was obviously not going to be as good as The Ipcress File.And it's not. The Ipcress File is still the best of Harry Palmer, but I thought this was the second best of the series. I found Funeral in Berlin to be mind-numbingly tedious, and Midnight in St. Petersburg didn't quite live up to this one.First thing, I'm going to address a few issues regarding plot holes or continuity. Make no mistake, this is one of those films you'll probably have to watch twice or even three times to fully comprehend all that's going on. You have to concentrate on it, you can't watch it and talk on the phone at the same time. So most plot holes are probably down to something the viewer missed (I certainly thought that the first time I watched it).This certainly isn't vintage Palmer, and I give it credit for not trying to be. Palmer is on the verge of retirement anyway, and so he's not going to be as quick or sharp as he once was (at least they didn't try and pretend he was still young!). Even so, he's still somewhat quick-witted and amusing, the milk in the tea joke being my favourite. He doesn't run from danger, something present in all the movies, even when he's being followed by the mafia, he's fairly daring once he's got away from them.As for the film itself, it's very fast-moving and fluid. There are a LOT of twists and turns in the plot, but I like the fact that's it's all within the time limit of the train arriving in Beijing, who's going to make it there etc. The trouble with something like the Ipcress File was the amount of free time Palmer had, and so it would sometimes seemingly stand still, whereas the train journey here gave it an edge.That's my humble opinion anyway, maybe I'm just uncultured. This certainly doesn't have the class of the 60s, but it makes up for it with the action, humour and plot-twists.8.5/10Incidentally, if you can get hold of it, there's a special edition DVD where Sue Lloyd has a slightly bigger role than a voice on the telephone.