Review: London

Hunter Richards’s London, the story of two straight dudes shooting the shit about their sexual and emotional impotencies inside a studio-sized bathroom, has the makings of a great gay porn. Syd (Chris Evans), a twentysomething jock type from New York City, meets Bateman (Jason Statham, with hair) at a local dive to score some blow. Rather than make the exchange and send Bateman on his way, Syd invites the fortysomething businessman to a party a friend is throwing for his ex-girlfriend London (Evans’s real-life squeeze Jessica Biel), who’s leaving the city in 24 hours in order to move in with her new boyfriend. After Syd and his new friend lock themselves inside an upstairs bathroom and start snorting lines of coke with a revolving-door of shameless chicks, Richards begins to catalog their numerous obsessions and hang-ups via a series of flashbacks. Insight is slim here—just your run-of-the-mill S&M fantasies, stoner conversations about the existence of God, and Syd’s inability to say “I love you”—but Richards spikes the script with some funny one-liners (their utter randomness suggests they were collected on bar napkins over the years) and makes hilarious use of Evans’s tattooed, exposed flesh. The actor is a sexy motherfucker—we know it, he knows it, and so does the camera; more times than not, his scorching sex appeal gets in the way of the narrative (notice how his character inexplicably spreads his legs and flexes his biceps inside a psychiatrist’s office), but this isn’t a bad thing per se. Richards recognizes and exploits Evans’s attractiveness, self-reflexively using it as a red herring. When Bateman tells Syd to stop worrying about the threat of another guy’s 10-and-a-half inch cock and think about how he used to pound London, he may as well be addressing the audience. Just as Syd’s beauty redirects London’s rage in one flashback sequence to a horizontal position, Evans’s muscled physique very readily allows the audience to ignore the film’s many shortcomings.