“Who can tell the difference between a horse and a donkey?” A harmless enough question if this were some kind of barnyard-based TV quiz show, but one with grave consequences if you are ageing hitman Tommy (Josh Duhamel), whose failing eyesight causes him to shoot the wrong guy in the wrong mask…
London Calling is an action comedy movie (trust me on this), directed by Allan Ungar (Bandit, also starring Duhamel) and written by Omer Levin Menekse, Quinn Wolfe and Ungar himself.
I’ll admit the central premise is intriguing.
After Tommy accidentally offs his boss’ wife’s cousin, (oh, the ties that bind!), he has to abandon his ex-wife and son in London and hide out in Los Angeles, carrying out hits for mobster Benson (Rick Hoffman).
When he hears his ex is marrying her gym teacher boyfriend, Tommy is desperate to go home, but how can he gain safe passage?
Benson, frustrated by his sweet-natured and irredeemably nerdy son Julian (Jeremy Ray Taylor), promises Tommy that if he takes the boy under his wing and turns him into a ruthless bastard worthy of inheriting the family business, he will sort things out with London crime boss Freddy Darby (Aidan Gillen), whose relative Tommy accidentally killed.
There’s nerdy and nerdy- Julian is more interested in Japanese porn and computer games than becoming a teenage John Wick and worst of all, he is a passionate LARPer- his happy place is waving a foam sword around with his pals, (he is a level three druid, no less), and mooning after his bully’s hot sister. How will the dysfunctional duo cope when Benson sends them to eliminate legendary hitman Alistair (Neil Sandilands)- although his religious epiphany means he just might confess all to the feds, but he is still one of the most dangerous men alive! Tommy is also blissfully unaware that a vengeful Darby has arrived in town and has persuaded Benson to double-cross him. Sometimes what you don’t know can still hurt you…
I really wanted to like this.
London Calling doesn’t skimp on the action front, but for a movie about a hit-man, there is a lot of gunplay but precious little gore. There have been many, many stories about over-the-hill assassins, (I know the schtick was mainly about his character’s failing sight rather than his age- that’s pretty much the same thing, right?), but Josh Duhamel seems way too young for this, as opposed to, say, Christolph Waltz in The Old Guy. I’d not really seen him in anything other than the Transformers franchise and thought he was charismatic enough given the material.
He worked well with teen co-star Taylor, who reminded me of a bonsai Joe Don Baker, (!), deserves much better and will probably get it. Sandilands’ Alastair, like a Biblical prophet brandishing a semi-automatic, was reminiscent of Billy Connolly’s master killer in The Boondock Saints, but we didn’t see nearly enough of him in action. Unlike the usually-brilliant Aiden Gillen, whose supposedly terrifying Freddy amounted to a Ricky Gervais impersonation in a pink suit…
But what of the comedy, I hear you ask?
Confronted by Russian gangsters, Tommy is asked to name his favourite author; Julian suggests Tolstoy, but the hapless hitman pronounces it as “Toy Story”… and that’s probably the pick of the bunch. This never pretended to be Mel Brooks with Uzi 9mm’s, of course, and it’s the relationship between mentor and mentee which keep it going. Of course, the movie couldn’t resist a dig at the LARPers in a scene which borrows perhaps too heavily from more mainstream mentor comedy Role Models. Rise up, fantasy cosplayers- you have nothing to lose but your plastic chains!
Overall, this is competently made but lacks the courage of its own convictions. It’s a fine line to walk between hard-hitting action and adult comedy, (multiple c-bombs do not an adult comedy make!), and I can’t help wishing that director had gone down the darker route.
Ostensibly this is a movie about fathers and sons. We learn that Tommy, Julian and indeed Adrian have shitty fathers who were responsible for sending them down a dark road, (no spoilers!), but there is so much about Tommy’s relationship with his own son that I’d like to have seen, particularly given that he had no qualms in training Justin as a killer… oh, if only the title of The Apprentice hadn’t been used already.
