Furthest thing from flawless gem
Perhaps most disheartening about the disjointed mess “Diamond Cartel” is that it will go down as the late, great Peter O’Toole’s final screen appearance. What he was doing in this cheesy, Kazakhstan shota-nd-set crime thriller is anyone’s guess; that he’s scarcely in it may be a saving grace.
Several other familiar actors also found their way into the mayhem here, most notably a bulky, scenery-chewing Armand Assante in a career low as an unhinged kingpin-type in pursuit of a mega-diamond.
Michael Madsen, Tommy “Tiny” Lister, Don “The Dragon” Wilson and Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa pop up as well in other blurry, one-note roles.
Nominal lead characters Ruslan (Alexey Frandetti) and Aliya (Karlygash Mukhamedzhanova), reunited ex-lovers who become dubiously involved with said diamond, provide a bit of focus to the plot. But the attractive pair too often gets lost amid baffling flashbacks, clunky action sequences, incoherent double-crosses, a rogues’ gallery of stock bad guys, tone-deaf melodrama, florid narration and scads of hackneyed dialogue.
Director Salamat Mukhammed-Ali, who co-wrote with Magamet Bachaev and Dauren Mussa, serves up a gaudy mishmash of visual styles that plays out against a whatever-works musical score. The film’s audio is, to be charitable, inconsistent.
The largely Russian- and Kazakh-speaking cast is so incongruously dubbed into English it evokes an old Japanese monster movie.
“Diamond Cartel.” Not rated. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes. Playing: Arena Cinelounge at the Montalban, Hollywood