THE WHOLE WORLD AT OUR FEET

Kazakhstan, 2015, 100 minutes, Colour.
Armand Asante, Michael Madsen, Olivier Gruner, Tommy Lister, Cary- Hiroyuki Tagawa, Peter O' Toole.
Directed by Salamaat Mukhammed- Ali.

Despite its being a box office success in Kazakhstan, this is a pretty terrible movie!

The director himself is from Kazakhstan and made short films, worked in the television industry, made music videos.

The story is fairly preposterous, a rich thug, Armand Asante, based in Kazakhstan, is in contact with diamond dealers in Hong Kong, making a deal to pay $30 million for a diamond.

The plot becomes fairly complicated, opening with a young man and woman travelling in a car through the desert and suddenly hit by a front end loader. Most of the rest of the film is, in fact, flashback and we are brought once again to the accident, which they survive, but…

The rich thug has all kinds of people working for him, including one who is accident-prone wearing loudly coloured shirts. There is also the thug’s protégé who, of course, is turning against him and doing deals with other criminal gangs. There are many criminal gangs, many criminals – and a lot of the time is taken up with their fights against each other, multiple shootouts. At one stage, with the thug’s money to buy the diamond, a girlfriend plus Michael Madsen and Tommy Lister, doing the negotiating and suddenly shot. Cary-Hiroyuki? Tagawa glares at the camera and at everyone at various times.

As a mindless action show, there is enough violence, chases and shooting to satisfy an audience who might wander into a theatre or see it on straight-to-video.

It should be said that the version under consideration is quite artificially dubbed.

And, then, at the end, who should suddenly appear, mysteriously and to little purpose before he is killed, Peter O’ Toole hope (seemingly dubbed) in his last film.

For the record, this is a Kazakhstan action show, utilising international actors, violent and, to a large extent, absurd.