This German documentary is a double biography: one of the ubiquitous Ak-47 assault rifle, and one of its creator, Mikhael Kalashnikov. Unfortunately, the resulting film is unfocused, with footage jumping haphazardly from the Urals to Afghanistan to the streets of Los Angeles, with very little attempt to tie the threads together. At one point an Afghani fighter bearing a strong resemblance to Rashid Dostum is interviewed, but never identified, and much of the film's Afghani and Russian dialogue goes untranslated for the English speaking audience. Even more strangely, Kalashnikov himself is subtitled for certain segments, and dubbed in others. It all adds up to an interesting but frequently unsatisfying documentary.
2 Reviews
fine in parts, unfocused and anti-gun in others
daniel-j-doughty19 December 2004
The film director is putting words into the mouth of the original engineer. I speak Russian quite well and at no time does Mikhail Kalashnikov state that he feels that criminal use of guns in the US is what he regrets the most. Yet the narrator makes this point and the movie seems to attempt to make this point several times.
The director also is quite misdirected in their information on steel-core bullets, AKA armor-piercing bullets.
In short, I'm a bit confused why two German film producers are so concerned about guns in the United States. And I'm very confused about how they seem to think that a Russian produced gun is somehow one of America's largest threats, as if other machine guns weren't available had this one not been produced? It's an OK film, but it's a bit annoying to wade through all the anti-gun nonsense just to get to the interesting bits. And in a bit of drama they ended the film with a bunch of hicks shooting up some gun range for no reason whatsoever. Only point in the damn film where an American shows up with a backwoods accent and of course they're acting like a bunch of jackasses...never mind the intelligent police officers that briefed the guy on the LA bank robbery that happened a few years ago. Yup, us dumb Americans can't be trusted with them crazy Russian machine guns.
The director also is quite misdirected in their information on steel-core bullets, AKA armor-piercing bullets.
In short, I'm a bit confused why two German film producers are so concerned about guns in the United States. And I'm very confused about how they seem to think that a Russian produced gun is somehow one of America's largest threats, as if other machine guns weren't available had this one not been produced? It's an OK film, but it's a bit annoying to wade through all the anti-gun nonsense just to get to the interesting bits. And in a bit of drama they ended the film with a bunch of hicks shooting up some gun range for no reason whatsoever. Only point in the damn film where an American shows up with a backwoods accent and of course they're acting like a bunch of jackasses...never mind the intelligent police officers that briefed the guy on the LA bank robbery that happened a few years ago. Yup, us dumb Americans can't be trusted with them crazy Russian machine guns.
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