All Things To All Men
Director: George Isaac
Actors: Rufus Sewell, Gabriel Byrne, Toby Stephens
Release Date: Monday 30th November -0001
Genre(s): Crime, Drama
Running time: UK minutes
Riley (Toby Stephens) is a top grade thief in London, and his latest heist has caught the attention of local Detective Parker (Rufus Sewell). You see, Parker is not as good as his job title would have you believe, and he cons local crime boss Joseph Corso (Gabriel Byrne) into hiring Riley for a massive vault job. If he doesn't, then Corso's son will go to jail for drug possession, but there's also an unhappy ending for Parker if he doesn't get the money up for some unhappy Turks. From here, things only get more and more confusing as more and more characters and past events are mentioned and referenced to, and you become really grateful when one of the character's gets killed because then that's one less person to keep track of.
Watching All Things To All Men is akin to watching the second part of a British TV crime soap two-parter, but having not seen the first one, you're dropped in the deep end of the plot with no points of reference. It remains this way for the first 45 minutes, as you try to figure out just who are the heroes, who are the villains, and what is their relationship to each other. By the time you've figured it all out though, you'll find it very difficult to care.
Debut writer/director George Isaac is best known for producing Kidulthood and Adulthood, and here tears into the back catalogue of other, better crime dramas for inspiration both with the visuals and with the story. However, we're still left wanting. The acting is mostly passable, but the script is a simple story told in an excruciatingly complicated way that you're never quite sure who's playing the good guy or the bad guy. Even at 88 minutes, the movie is an exhausting slog that you can't wait to be over.
You know that when your favourite part of the movie is trying to place the music cues it's stolen from other movies - Dracula, Big Trouble In Little China, Beverley Hills Cop 2 - you've got a dud on your hands.
