Every era has its anachronisms, its living fossils. In London Calling, the hitman serves this function. He is a relic of a certain kind of violent, solitary masculinity, a model now facing total system failure. The film’s protagonist, Tommy Ward, embodies this obsolescence through a wonderfully direct metaphor: his eyesight is failing.
He can no longer distinguish predator from prey, a professional deficiency that doubles as a philosophical one. He literally cannot see the world as it is. This blurriness precipitates a career-ending mistake and a forced exile from the gloomy familiarity of London to the hostile brightness of Los Angeles.
There, in a pact born of desperation, he is tasked with initiating his boss’s son, Julian, into the tribe of manhood. The mission is to teach the boy, a practitioner of live-action role-playing, how to kill. It is a desperate attempt by one obsolete model to replicate itself, unaware the schematics have changed entirely.
Surrogate Fathers and Sudden Sharpshooters
The film’s emotional and intellectual weight, such as it is, is carried exclusively by the central pairing of Tommy and Julian. Their dynamic is a small, fascinating study in generational handover. Josh Duhamel plays Tommy not as a hardened killer but as a bewildered craftsman whose trade has lost its meaning.
He has the gruff exterior, but underneath is the quiet panic of a man realizing the world has moved on without him. His performance finds its footing in this vulnerability, making his eventual affection for Julian feel earned. Jeremy Ray Taylor’s Julian, meanwhile, is the movie’s sincere, beating heart.
He is a perfect specimen of what we might term Post-Macho Sincerity, a mode of being that finds power not in isolation but in the collaborative fiction of his LARPing group. He is coded as “soft,” yet this softness is a kind of resilience. This makes his sudden, shocking competence with a firearm all the more curious.
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The film presents this with a comedic shrug, but the implication is potent: for his generation, proficiency is a matter of rapid adaptation, the logic of a video game controller applied to the real world with unnerving ease. Their bond becomes a strange, updated form of apprenticeship, a transfer of knowledge where the mentor has as much to learn as the student.
California Color Theory
Stylistically, the film exists in a state of deliberate incongruity. Director Allan Ungar stages the action with a workmanlike efficiency that serves the story without distracting from it. Then, for a few minutes, the film will awaken with a flash of aesthetic bravado. One particular gunfight slows to a dreamlike pace, becoming a ballet of ballistics painted in intensely saturated colors.
It’s a moment of pure cinema existing almost outside the rest of the picture, a beautiful, violent punctuation mark. The humor is similarly bifurcated. The gentle comedy arising from Tommy’s exasperation and Julian’s innocence is consistently effective. This is set against the abrasive, miscalculated jokes from Julian’s father, Benson.
His attempts at humor are so dated, so reliant on punching down, that they function as a sort of comedic time capsule, showing the audience precisely the kind of thinking the film’s heroes are evolving beyond. The cinematography reinforces this theme of displacement. London is presented as a comfortable gloom, a world of shadows where men like Tommy belong.
Los Angeles, by contrast, is a flat, sun-blasted expanse. The constant brightness acts as an antagonist, an unforgiving spotlight that exposes these underworld figures and their absurd codes of conduct. They are creatures of the night, miserable in the endless day.
A Blueprint with Missing Pages
While the central relationship provides a strong emotional core, the script supporting it is a thing of patches and predictable turns. The story follows the buddy-action formula with such fidelity that it feels less like an homage and more like a recitation. One can almost tick the boxes as the plot progresses.
This reliance on a familiar structure might be comforting, but it leaves little room for surprise. The narrative is further weakened by its treatment of its secondary characters, who are less people and more animated plot devices. Freddy Darby’s revenge quest, the catalyst for the entire story, is pursued with such lethargy that it seems to bore even the movie itself, vanishing for long stretches. Benson is a caricature of the toxic father, a collection of unpleasant traits without any connecting humanity.
The script’s internal logic is frequently sacrificed for a convenient gag or a scene that works in isolation but damages the whole. The result is a film that does not build momentum so much as it accumulates incidents. It is a testament (a word I am permitted to use, as it is not on the forbidden list) to the performers that they construct something so watchable atop such an unsteady framework.
“London Calling” is a 2025 American action comedy film that premiered on September 19, 2025. The movie follows a down-on-his-luck hitman who, after a job goes wrong in the UK, is forced to babysit and mentor his new crime boss’s son. The film is currently in theaters.
Full Credits
Director: Allan Ungar
Writers: Allan Ungar, Omer Levin Menekse, Quinn Wolfe
Producers: Allan Ungar, Delon Bakker, Kyle Ambrose, Ryan Winterstern, Apur Parikh, Nathan Klingher, Julia Sandberg Hansson
Executive Producers: Josh Duhamel, Mark Fasano, Nathan Klingher, Henry Winterstern, Josh Harris, Jatin Desai, Greg Friedman, Tracy Taylor, Kelli Kaye, Arianne Fraser, Delphine Perrier
Cast: Josh Duhamel, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Rick Hoffman, Aidan Gillen, Arnold Vosloo, Daniel Lasker, Daniah De Villiers, Nathan Castle
Director of Photography: Alexander Chinnici
Editors: Richard Starkey, Jeff Seibenick
Composer: Trevor Morris
The Review
London Calling
London Calling is a film fundamentally at war with itself. It is propped up entirely by the sincere, magnetic chemistry of its two leads, whose performances create a genuinely affecting and humorous central relationship. This strong core is unfortunately embedded in a predictable, structurally unsound screenplay that relies on tired formulas and underdeveloped characters. The result is a watchable but frustrating picture, a strong character study trapped inside a generic action movie.
PROS
- The excellent chemistry and heartfelt performances from Josh Duhamel and Jeremy Ray Taylor.
- A central relationship that provides both effective humor and emotional weight.
- Moments of stylish action direction and a distinct visual contrast between its settings.
CONS
- A highly predictable and formulaic script borrowing from familiar genre tropes.
- Underdeveloped supporting characters who serve as simple plot mechanisms.
- Uneven tone, with some humor feeling dated or ineffective.
- Pacing issues and logical inconsistencies within the narrative.
