The 2005 movie full of “cokeheads” that Roger Ebert couldn’t stand
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There’s damning a movie with the faintest of praise, and then there’s damning a movie with so little praise that commending its actors for doing the bare minimum for playing snuff-hoovering trollops is the best you can do. Highly specific circumstances, yes, but parameters Roger Ebert once found himself in.
In his defence, cocaine is basically the driving force behind the story, and thus, the film’s entire existence. There’s only so much any writer or director could do with a narrative that’s predicated on a coke-fuelled party, but the critic obviously felt that Hunter Richards was woefully ill-equipped for the task at hand.
Since it was his first and last feature-length venture from behind the camera, though, maybe he had a point. In the mid-2000s, and even today, to be honest, if you saw Jason Statham and Chris Evans attached to the same picture, you’d be well within your rights to assume that it was an action thriller of some kind.
After all, the last time they’d been attached to the same picture, which was released the year before, it was David R Ellis’ Cellular, which was, in fact, an action thriller. However, things weren’t the same the second time around, leaving Ebert as nonplussed with 2005’s London as he was thoroughly unamused.
Summing up his feelings on the lifeless drama, he didn’t mince his words, and he didn’t seem to want to waste them, either: “Bad movie, ugly movie,” captured everything he felt about the flick in four words, and as much as Statham and Evans barely scraped passing marks, he wasn’t quite as generous with the female characters.
The latter opts to attend a going-away party being held by Jessica Biel’s ex-girlfriend despite not being invited, bringing along the former, who happens to be her cocaine dealer, as his plus one. The house hosting the bash is owned by the parents of Isla Fisher’s character, with Kelli Garner and Joy Bryant joining them to increase the number of people who want to do little else than snort lines and have a good time.
“Chris Evans and Jason Statham have verbal facility and energy,” Ebert mused. “Which enables them to propel this dreck from one end of 92 minutes to the other.” That was the nicest thing he had to say about London, with the one-dimensional, thinly written women who surround the three leads at the central shindig making him want to pray on their behalf.
“The women in the movie are all perfectly adequate at playing bimbo cokeheads,” he added, which was the script doing a disservice to Biel, Fisher, Garner, and Bryant as much as he was, but he did at least try to atone. “I have seen all of these actors on better days in better movies, and I may have a novena said for them.”
Needless to say, Ebert was not thrilled with London, but he did somehow find it in his heart to award the film one whole star. It could have been worse, because he wasn’t exactly showering it in superlatives.
