All Things to All Men

Sigh: here's not much of anything for anyone, actually, to indulge a self-evident riff on the title of yet another in a seemingly ceaseless parade of subpar Brit-gangster films, this one from first-time writer/director George Isaac, who produced the Kidulthood/Adulthood celluloid duo.

Notable largely for casting some rather rarefied actors deliberately violently against type, the film is best seen as the pay cheque that has helped allow at least two of its three leads to take on less lucrative theatre work of late. For that largesse, after a fashion: one star. Otherwise, well, you stand forewarned. 

In fact, one can't come down too specifically harshly on Isaac's script for the simple reason that large chunks of it are impossible to understand. That's especially true when Rufus Sewell (pictured below right) is lending his distinctive vocal husk to the part of Parker, a cop of dubious morality who gets enmeshed in a cat-and-mouse chase across London that ticks off all the obvious landmarks right on cue. This is Sewell's first English film since 1996, which makes one wonder what the others were like that this wonderful theatre actor turned down.

His prey (or maybe not) is heist-meister Riley (Toby Stephens), whom we can assume to be trouble since Stephens spends his share of the film's 88 minutes knitting his brow and looking alternately stern and sceptical - the last, most likely, after having read his scenes. Completing the above-the-title trifecta is a washed-out Gabriel Byrne (pictured below), playing a crime lord and abject dad called Joseph Corso who wants to engage Riley's services and who gets a primal scream near the finish that seems to come from an entirely different movie. So, for that matter, does a lingering shot of a gnarled tree by way - for some inexplicable reason - of Beckett, 

Cue ceaselessly pounding music - was the film's soundscape taped in a cardiac ward? - and lots of purposeful striding about, one or another of the cast occasionally breaking into a sprint so that even more tourist hot spots can be ticked off, from the London Eye to Canary Wharf. I warmed especially to the Westbury Hotel - where I once had a very nice meal but I digress - and Battersea Power Station, the latter looming far more imposingly than the actors do. 

The dialogue that can be deciphered tends either towards the gnomic or the confrontational, the latter along the none-too-original lines of, "What's it going to be, five minutes or five years?" (I thought you'd never ask.) The lone female presence of any note is Spanish actress Elsa Pataky, here resembling a waxier version of Sandra Bullock in a film in which potential eroticism is quickly jettisoned in favour of yet another faux-testosterone-filled set-to.

Double-dealing and duplicity abound on the way to a twist ending about which I can't imagine anyone giving a toss, so scant is our investment in the characters on view. That said, prior to All Things to All Men, I had never clocked that Sewell in profile and from a certain angle looks just a tiny bit like Sylvester Stallone. Now there are two actors I never thought would feature in the same sentence. And, I trust, are unlikely to again.

Watch the trailer for All Things to All Men