For several years, French director Romain Gavras has been at the forefront of the music video scene, creating confronting, sumptuous-looking visual experiences like Jamie xx's Gosh and M.I.A's Born Free.
He brings his trademark flair and pop sensibility to The World Is Yours, his second feature. Owing a pretty sizeable debt to the work of Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie, the film depicts the conflict between Danny (Isabelle Adjani), a safe-cracking matriarch and her mild, gentle-natured son Francois (Karim Leklou), who longs to get clean of the life of crime his family and friends are embroiled in and open up a Mr Freeze franchise.
Sadly, outstanding debts require him to come back for one last job and, as you can probably imagine, hijinks ensue.
The film is a breezy, high-flying heist romp, packed with delectably composed images bursting with colour that one might expect from such an image-focused film-maker. The cast is uniformly strong - most notably Vincent Cassel in an amusingly laid-back supporting turn as a sometime lover of Danny's who becomes embroiled in fake-news YouTube conspiracy theories.
The cast of characters and plot specifics are appreciably bonkers - a grenade in a Hello Kitty backpack, a troupe of deadly Zairian gangsters that all sport bleach-blond dye-jobs, a virtuoso montage set to Toto's Africa - all propelled along by a wonderful score composed by Jamie xx.
