London Calling

The Nearsighted Assassin and the Gentle Gamer

There’s a particular sadness to watching an action star realize his body has started to slip the schedule. Josh Duhamel spent years coasting on that polished, invincible kind of charm—the handsome soldier in *Transformers*, the dependable romantic lead. But nobody outruns time forever, not even square-jawed movie stars. In *London Calling*, he plays Tommy Ward, a professional hitman who very badly, very urgently, needs to see an optometrist.

The movie opens inside a throbbing London nightclub lit in harsh neon. The bass feels like it could loosen your fillings. Everyone on the dance floor is wearing animal masks, and the place has the sticky, feverish energy of a bad dream. Tommy is there to kill someone. His target is supposed to be in a brown jacket and a horse mask. He takes aim, fires, and disappears. Only later do we learn he actually killed a man in a black jacket wearing a donkey mask. He squinted, guessed, and blew it. It’s a wonderfully pitiful error. That one mistake sends Tommy running to Los Angeles—convincingly doubled here by a scorched-looking Cape Town—and leaves his own son behind.



Director Allan Ungar seems genuinely interested in smashing old-school tough-guy grit into modern geek culture and seeing what survives. Ungar, who previously directed Duhamel in the better-than-expected true-crime caper *Bandit*, first made noise with a viral *Uncharted* fan film. He knows the language of games. Here, he pours that affection into Julian, played by Jeremy Ray Taylor with a sweet, shambling innocence. Julian is the son of an LA mobster in tracksuits, played by Rick Hoffman, who chews scenery so hard there’s barely any left. Julian has no interest in numbers, beatdowns, or inherited criminal masculinity. He’d rather play Fortnite and do Live Action Role-Playing. His father, appalled by that softness, orders Tommy to drag the kid along on a string of hits and "make him a man."

I’m not sure the tonal whiplash ever fully settles. A lot of the time, the movie feels like two scripts elbowing each other for space. One is a bloody crime thriller with an offended British mob boss at its center, played by Aidan Gillen with that effortless menace he barely has to work for. The other is a broad buddy comedy where a contract killer teaches a LARPer how to hold a gun. A critic at *The Guardian* wrote that the film "aims for amoral Tarantinoesque snark, but too often delivers scattershot puerility." That feels fair. Some jokes are dead on arrival. Still, I kept giving the film more leeway than it probably deserved because of how much the actors are doing physically.



Look at Duhamel in the scenes where Tommy has to mentor Julian. He doesn’t carry himself like a precision weapon; he carries himself like a worn-out middle manager who hasn’t slept right in months. His shoulders sag under the weight of abandoning his own family. When Julian starts excitedly applying video-game logic to an actual shootout, Tommy rubs his eyes. It’s not a macho eye-roll. It’s the gesture of a man who is simply tired. Taylor, who a lot of people will remember as the sweet kid from the *It* films, uses his open, gentle face almost like armor against the ugliness around him. Ungar apparently had to tell Taylor, a real-life powerlifter, to hide that strength and play entirely soft. That choice matters. Their chemistry is what keeps this lopsided machine from falling apart.



Eventually, *London Calling* quits straining to be a sleek *John Wick* echo and relaxes into what it really is: a movie about substitute fatherhood. Tommy needs someone young to protect, maybe to square the ledger on his own failures as a parent. Julian needs an adult who doesn’t meet him with immediate disappointment. There’s a small moment late in the film, tucked between the gunfire and chaos, where Tommy actually listens as Julian talks about the things he loves. Duhamel’s face loosens. The rigidity drains from his neck. In a genre obsessed with piling up bodies, a scene built around someone genuinely listening lands almost like rebellion. Whether that center is enough to outweigh the film’s messy structure probably comes down to your tolerance for shaggy B-movie nonsense. I’ll likely forget most of the shootouts by tomorrow. But the image of a near-sighted assassin trying to understand a teenager who just wants to play make-believe is going to stick.