All In Good Time (By Callum Edmunds) Review
It's a bit better than Rogue Elements...and yet still fails in the same way.
All In Good Time is a short film made by Callum Edmunds, better known as Mauler. Once again: Not a big fan of Mauler. I liked his Unbridled Rage about Black Panther (though in hindsight that's a terrible video) and the one about Justice League. ... And then the fucker drops a fucking THREE AND A HALF HOUR VIDEO (that is only a single part of a series) on the RIse of Skywalker, complains about the flickering lighting in the shuttle and I had enough. Mauler's issue is that his works basically devolve into a Gish Gallop: they're so utterly long that any kind of dissent gets snuffed out because that's way too much effort to go through in order to showcase why he's wrong. Mauler's length pretty much removes any possibility of someone giving proper feedback and I find that disrespectful. But unlike Drinker, I don't really remember most of his usual criticisms and my complaints are basically ethical in nature so the actual quality of his work should still come through.
So the basic plot of the short film is that an heir to a crime family rounds up four people, shoots three dead and the gun jams on the third (yes, third. We'll get to it). So the heir gets his henchman to fix the gun and while they do so, the heir and the hostage, the MC, talk. Simple premise for a dialogue based character study, perfectly acceptable for a self contained short film unlike Rogue Elements' reliance on two other fucking books for the necessary context. It also has some good characterization through action and dialogue. The heir is a manchild with his head up his ass but gets easily agitated when things don't go his way. We see this in how the henchman tries offering his gun when the first jams, but the heir rejects it, calls him an ape and makes him fix the gun after threatening his life. We get a justification for this later when the heir states he uses his gun because he's killed so many with it. And while...very blunt, the use of the glass of water and the hauling away of dead bodies alongside the ticking clock makes for effective visual storytelling as the story builds to the final shot. There's some legitimately good stuff here.
Problems start arising quickly though. The MC is the only other character and he's...angry. Not particularly expressive in his anger, just seethes with a cold fury at the heir as he gets under his skin. Clearly he's not in his normal state so I can't really judge him based on his actions here. We have no background details on the MC so I can make no judgements on him. He's a complete cypher as a person, which is a problem when he's one of TWO characters in the entire short film. And while I said the heir was well characterized...that's only half true.
See, the beginning of the story has him shooting the three other hostages but I called the MC the 'third hostage'. That's because the heir was shooting the hostages in a row. The MC was the third but when the henchman goes to take off the black bag around his head, the heir stops him and moves onto the fourth. Why? I dunno. He notes that the MC didn't flinch when the gun jammed but that happens AFTER he skipped him. It happens because plot. (Side note: this is so weird because the MC could have just been the fourth hostage. I assume he's the third because that position lines up with the table and chair the heir uses but there are better ways at making the actor comfortable). He's also extremely immature and rash. Dude threatens his henchman because he dared to offer his gun and insults him for it. He all but demands the MC to beg for his life. He has his henchman remove the hoods of the hostages just so he can hear them plea (I think, it's never stated why he does that). He shot a dog for biting him. He also gets played by the MC constantly into losing his composure and comes across as some insecure teen trapped in a 40 year old man's body. And yet he's willing to offer to spare the MC's life because he seems to be working for someone/has info even though the MC keeps getting under his skin. Even the idea that he does this for a sense of submission is off because the MC really does undermine him in the convo MULTIPLE times. No way a man this insecure would allow such a thing.
I also dunno how competent I'm supposed to see the heir. One of the hostages begs for her life by offering some vague 'info' before being shot, but does care about the possible info the MC might have. So is he so rash that he will kill a hostage trying to offer info to sate his sadism? Or was the hostage just bluffing? I assume it might be the later...based on the usual cliche of a hostage bluffing to save their life but I have nothing to go off of here.
And there lies the real problem of All In Good Time: I don't have any info to go off of. I assume the heir is an immature jackass from how he acts, as if he stepped off the page of a Gigachad meme, but I have no real basis to say for certain. A gas attack orchestrated by the heir comes up and the MC shows contempt for his killings, and it's later revealed he planned on killing the heir using gas, so I assume he has a connection to the attack. But i don't know. He could also be working for someone...I still don't know. The possibility of the hostages not being so innocent comes up by the heir, but I can't tell if he's meant to have a point or if it's just more flailing. I don't know why the heir is killing these people other than supposedly cleaning up his father's messes (...which he could also be wrong about). I don't know how the MC ended up caught in this mess. I don't know how or where he got the gas used to kill the heir. I just don't know nearly enough to be invested, and thus I don't care about any of this. This is supposed to be a character study piece between two people in a conflict and about how they think but I can barely piece together the heir's view and the MC just exists to Gigachad him. Hell, I don't even know for certain if the gas used to kill the heir was the same one he used to kill others, which is pretty bad for an ending that's meant to be cathartic.
Overall, All In Good Time is better than Rogue Elements. But Rogue Elements was a complete fuck of investment, build up and context which broke everything about it. All in Good Time doesn't break as much since its self-contained. But you still don't have enough info to truly get the story, so it breaks just like Rogue Elements. And it ends up nowhere near as good as Mauler's usual subjects so...that's embarassing.
