Oh, were you wondering if a film called London Calling, which takes place, in part, in London, would feature the song “London Calling,” by The Clash? It does — twice — and that’s about the only thing you need to know to get the idea that Allan Ungar’s buddy action-comedy is so packed with tropes you might find yourself rolling your eyes mere minutes into its tedious, nearly two-but-feels-like-three-hour runtime.
London Calling Loses Intrigue Almost Immediately
After 2022’s Bandit, Ungar here has teamed up again with Josh Duhamel, whose real-life past as a model is about the only thing here masquerading as a character trait. The plot is somehow both contrived and mind-numbingly simple. Tommy Ward (Duhamel), after having inadvertently killed a distant relative of cold-blooded crime boss Freddy Darby (Game of Thrones star Aiden Gillen), must flee to Los Angeles, where he is tasked with mentoring his new boss’s LARPing son Julian (Jeremy Ray Taylor).
Tommy leaves behind his own son, Oliver (Finnley Barrett), in London, to seek safety on the West Coast, and though writers Omer Levin Menekse and Quinn Wolfe have made it abundantly clear that Tommy is a ᴅᴇᴀᴅbeat dad with essentially zero relationship to his child, who does not care about him in turn, we’re also supposed to believe this is a relationship that is worth fighting for and enough to anchor something resembling an emotional bedrock for the film to skate on.
In L.A., Tommy works for Jewish crime boss Benson (Rick Hoffman), who is exceedingly abusive towards his 18-year-old son, Julian, who seems unaffected by his father’s endless barbs. Hoffman’s character has been written in such a way as to carry the weight of Menekse’s and Wolfe’s worst and most offensive impulses.
He harps on Julian “becoming a man” repeatedly and more than once implies that his son’s predilection for the wholesome activity of LARPing belies a latent homoSєxuality. He worries his son will become a “pansy,” or a “poof,” which is the kind of lightly coded homophobia one would ᴀssume had died in the 1990s. He is later labeled as a “marshmallow,” in reference to his weight, and can only berate his Russian girlfriend, who he dismissively refers to as someone he met in a “whorehouse.”
Of course, we are supposed to see Benson as an unfeeling maniac, but it’s clear the filmmakers kind of agree with Benson’s view of his child as a soft, worthless nothingburger, and at the very least want us to find his despicable nature funny. Why Benson is so fixated on his son’s masculinity is beyond comprehension, but whatever the case, he decides that the best way to get him to man up is to, beyond all logic, send him on a hit with Tommy, who only agrees to mentor Julian in exchange for pᴀssage back to London and to his own son.
London Calling Tries & Fails To Be A Kooky Buddy Comedy
Thus, the film begins in earnest as a comic, diet Léon the Professional (1994) — if Jean Reno’s main attributes were being H๏τ and in need of glᴀsses. But Duhamel’s conventionally attractive face is not the only thing being stereotyped here. Julian is an overweight nerd who cosplays and doesn’t know how to speak to girls; a fellow LARPer needs an inhaler; the Jewish crime boss is quick to accept a bribe but is stingy in handing out extra cash; less offensive but still silly is the British penchant for finely tailored suits.
I’m supposed to find all of this stuff kooky and off the wall, or so the film’s hokey score wants me to believe, but the thing is that nearly nothing here is all that funny, and very little of the action is tangibly interesting. It’s very difficult to see what’s wrong with Julian, whose biggest flaw seems to be that he’s really sweet and caring, but I’m also clearly supposed to see him as an oafish weakling.
But then maybe that’s not true, because there’s a scene where Julian shoots every empty bottle in target practice with perfect precision, and he so immediately takes to the life of a hitman that he begins talking about how this is what he was meant to do. Make it make sense.
If Benson is such a ruthless crime boss, why is he risking a job by sending his teenage son on it? If I’m meant to believe that Julian is a weak-willed child, why is he better at carrying out a hit than the movie’s main character, who has been described to us as a master at his craft? Why is Darby spending so much mental energy on killing the killer who killed a relative that is so detached from him he can’t even remember how they’re related? Is that really supposed to be so funny it warrants repeated reference?
Buddy comedies are usually predicated on a premise of mismatched characters from different worlds, where people whose temperaments are categorically at odds clash in escalating set pieces before they eventually find a rhythm. There is typically some external set of strange odds which puts the two together. It’s strange then that London Calling doesn’t really have any conflict except the persistent threat of violence, but even then it never really tips into the realm of the believable.
Unlike the comedy, Ungar does know how to shoot action decently well, and it’s in those scenes when the film momentarily comes alive. A penultimate gunfight which is staged like a slow-motion ballet and sH๏τ with vibrant hues is a particularly fun flash of excitement. But when your film has at least 30 minutes of excess dialogue and “quippy” banter which depends on your taste for roasting, and when there are no characters that resemble legitimate human beings, it makes it quite hard to care about anything except for its merciful end.
