Paul Kaye

(On Cable TV, September 2021) I’m half bemused by It’s All Gone Pete Tong, a film that doesn’t really knows what it wants to be and only moderately works in small bursts. Initially presenting itself as a mockumentary comedy about a star DJ, it ends up breaking nearly everything about that initial promise. Blending real-world DJ celebs with a fictional protagonist (Paul Kaye as a DJ demigod) in a pseudo-documentary format, it often means to be so excessive as to be ridiculous. But this is not a finely tuned film, and before long the deviations from its initial style become apparent. The mockumentary format is a mere pretence, as we’re quickly (and increasingly) presented with shots and sequences that can’t be explained by a TV crew filming the events. The comedy is also very uneven, with writer-director Michael Dowse inconsistently reaching for absurd humour and then drawing back into more mundane material. Even the overall genre of the film changes once the main conflict is introduced: After years of loud living, our protagonist is losing his hearing, and no amount of help or medical treatment will enable him to regain his hearing. It turns really dark at times despite the half-hearted attempts at comedy, and the parallels with the superior Sound of Metal (featuring a heavy metal drummer also losing his hearing) are perhaps a bit too raw to keep enjoying It’s All Gone Pete Tong as a comedy. Curiously (or appropriately enough for a film I find mediocre at best), the electronic music of the film is uneven, rarely taking advantage of the feast of opportunities that the early-2000s Ibiza scene presented. I’m left more disappointed than anything else by It’s All Gone Pete Tong: there is some good raw material and snippets in here, but it doesn’t cohere nor lead to a satisfying experience for the viewers.