Justin Price’s Wrong Place, Wrong Time begins with a shoot-out. This opening with the five main characters, while having overbearing music and bland lighting, does give an entertaining start to the story. There is an insane amount of cutting from character to character, but this scene encapsulates the fun that can be found in seeing people get cartoonishly murdered, blood splashing on random bystanders.
After this fun display of blood and gunplay, the film grinds to a halt. The five criminals regroup to discuss the biggest heist of their lives: stealing 14 billion dollars. Leader Soloman (Alex Ryan Brown) explains the plan to the other four, who all agree to take part in the heist. However, to accomplish this monumental task, they’ll have to do it in one night.
Of course, the plan goes south as Gabriel (Mike Markoff) gets badly injured, and the rest of the team has to make a break for it since he is in desperate need of medical attention. Soon, the team make their way into a seemingly unoccupied house. They find that people are chained up and aren’t speaking. What’s more, is that the owner of the house has returned and offers the five of them help. The entire situation is getting pretty weird, but Soloman and the rest of the team are ready to leave and get Gabriel to the hospital.
“…the team make their way into a seemingly unoccupied house. They find that people are chained up…”
All seems well until one final setback turns this movie from that of a crime drama into a straight-up horror film. Out of nowhere, the homeowner’s mischievous intentions are revealed as it’s shown that he can create grotesque, humanoid monsters out of humans.
The genre shift in the second half of Wrong Place, Wrong Time certainly breaks up the monotonous plot but does little else. All that’s achieved is simple shock value as many of the underdeveloped characters are goofily killed by the monsters. Sure, in theory, the kills should be engaging and fun, but the lighting and framing drastically stunt the potential that could’ve been had from the horror elements.
The dialogue delivery is noticeably awkward, and this heavily affects scenes where two or more characters are having a conversation. Many sequences feel roughly stitched together, with the heist, in particular, having such poor editing that it’s hard to comprehend what’s even happening. Even the overall look is bland due to the lighting as mentioned earlier and shallow depth of field, so the horror moments never even use the shadowplay in an effective manner.
Overall, Wrong Place, Wrong Time is a disjointed mess of a movie that delivers a strange yet predictable story. Justin Price takes such little care and finesse in giving the film its own voice that it ends up being nothing but a poorly executed affair that offers little in terms of substance.
"…fun display of blood and gunplay..."
