LONDON CALLING - Mark Reviews Movies

London Calling, Quiver Distribution

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 18, 2025

Josh Duhamel has become quite the effective leading man in lower-budget actioners, which might sound like an insult but most definitely isn't intended to be. For example, he's very funny and charming in London Calling, a movie that needs to be funny and charming for us to overlook how generic it is. Without Duhamel as a hitman trying to teach a younger guy the ropes while evading several other professional killers who want to murder him, it's possible the movie might not have possessed either of those necessary qualities.

The setup here takes more explanation than a throwaway comedic thriller likely should require, and to be sure, the screenplay, written by director Allan Ungar with Omer Levin Menekse and Quinn Wolfe, feels as if two or three different premises have been lumped together as one. In the first bit, Duhamel's Tommy, who became a hitman in London after falling in love and starting a family with a woman who is now his ex-wife, accidentally kills a relative of a notorious crime boss.

This is, as unlikely as it may seem, amusing for two reasons. The first is because the relative is a cousin of the crime lord's wife, and the second is because the mobster is played by Aidan Gillen, who plays the role so seriously that the joke is how everyone believes the crime boss is either putting on a show or has his priorities completely out of whack. Freddy Darby, this overly severe gangster, might have been a very funny villain to follow, as his overblown sense of the significance of assorted things could have been shown and constantly called into question, but his revenge mission is more a throwaway joke to set the plot in motion.

That plot is set a year after the unintentional killing, as Tommy has said goodbye to his life in a London for a new one in sunny Los Angeles. He hates it but still does contract killing for new boss Benson (Rick Hoffman), whose 18-year-old Julian (Jeremy Ray Taylor) is a nerdy young man whose interests in video games and live-action role playing have convinced his old man that the family business will end with him.

This sets up the two competing plots. One has Tommy's latest target revealing the hidden hitman's location to Freddy, sending the gangster to Los Angeles to finally get his revenge. The other has Benson forcing Tommy to bring Julian along on a different hit, so that his son can finally prove himself worthy of being Benson's successor or not.

This mismatched pairing is nothing unique, except, perhaps, how Julian's knowledge of his father's violent business and the expectation that he's supposed to follow in his old man's footsteps seems to have absolutely no effect on the character. One would imagine that a man as tough as Benson might not allow his only son and heir to become the kind of young man Julian has, but there's not much of a gag in that sort of logical depiction of a father-son relationship like this one.

The joke, of course, is that Julian is quite incompetent, save for the when the joke is how surprisingly competent he is, for example, at shooting a gun (Meanwhile, Tommy is near-sighted, misses a lot while shooting, and stubbornly refuses to admit it). Taylor plays the gag and the character well, and the interplay between the young man and his increasingly frustrated mentor can be amusing.

That the movie has a casual attitude toward violence and death is probably to be expected, and if one can get past the notion that the sheltered Julian responds with surprising calm to so many life-or-death situations and bloody killings, the characters' own attitudes reflect that. There's another pretty funny joke about an infamous killer named Allistair (Neil Sandilands) who has become a bit of a legendary figure in the criminal underworld. That might be because he seems incapable of being killed, no matter how many bullets, explosions, and other seemingly fatal things are sent his way.

Inevitably, Freddy's goal comes into play, and a third story idea also emerges, as Tommy becomes a fatherly figure to Julian, making the former realize how much he has failed in that role to his actual son and the latter understand that his own father isn't much of one. Somewhere along the way to developing and playing each of these narrative threads, the filmmakers have lost the bigger picture of giving this story a clear focus, a sense of momentum, and the feeling that these characters could exist outside of the plotting and serving the jokes.

London Calling becomes a vehicle for action and humor first and foremost, and because the screenplay is so transparently a collection of vague ideas, it's not a particularly convincing one, either. The cast members, especially Duhamel, do what they can, but even charming and funny performances can't add much heft to material this thin.

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