All Gone Wrong (2021) Review
All Gone Wrong opens with the film’s scariest scene, Officer Chris Halvorsen (Jake Kaufman, A Short History of Drugs in the Valley, Married in a Year) happily tells Mikey (Pete Winfrey, Triple Feature, Cook & Banks) the rookie cop he’s partnered with, that they have probable cause for a search warrant. Which means they can go in and seize whatever they claim was purchased with the proceeds of a crime. No need for proof or for a conviction, just take it and it goes to the department’s budget.
That is a real thing, it’s called “civil asset forfeiture” or in less fancy terms. legalized theft. And that scene damages the lead character’s likability right away for no good reason as it never becomes a factor in All Gone Wrong’s plot.
Jump forward a couple of months Chris and Mikey are conducting an undercover buy when things go wrong. Mikey ends up dead and Chris is suspended. This means, under the code of TV and Movie Policemen, he’s obligated to conduct his own off the books investigation. And that points him in the direction of Lamont Hughes (Tony Todd, The Reenactment, Stoker Hills), a crime boss with a very fearsome reputation.
Writer/director Josh Guffey sets to tone by creating an air of uncertainty. The chief (Peter Mayer, Darkness Reigns, Exorcist: House of Evil) tells Mikey he doesn’t trust Chris. He also overrules Chris and sends the inexperienced rookie into the house to make the buy. Maybe he had reasons for wanting the investigation to fail. Is Chris’ investigation a quest for justice, or trying to cover his tracks?
Unfortunately, Guffey quickly throws that uncertainty away and turns the film into a straightforward crime thriller where the biggest mysteries are whether or not Jolene (Krystal Torres, For All Mankind, Curved), the waitress with connections to Hughes can be trusted. And whether Goldy (Law X, Entanglement, When Day Gets Dark) who was involved in Mikey’s death and who Hughes wants dead will team with a cop even with his life at stake.
The other major problem with All Gone Wrong is its pace. The film is, to put it mildly, slow with tons of talk and little else to keep the plot moving from point to point. And often it arrives to find the viewer already there, having figured it out halfway through the previous overly drawn-out scene. What action scenes the film does have are minimal in number and over quickly.
The cast at least tries to do something with their characters but they’re so one-dimensional that there really isn’t much that they can do. None of them have any real backstory or development, they aren’t even given any reasons why the viewer should like them let alone care what happens to them.
Guffey’s background is in shooting commercials and “branded content” so he knows how to make sure the film is competent on a technical level. It looks decent and the sound is solid, but unfortunately, that competency doesn’t extend to the plot. For a script that’s been worked on since 2011, All Gone Wrong is incredibly generic but quite well-named.
Buffalo 8 will release All Gone Wrong to VOD and Digital platforms on January 27th. You can check the film’s Facebook page for more details. if this isn’t quite what you were looking for, FilmTagger can offer up some other suggestions.