Hot Guys with Guns (2013)

Although I enjoyed Noah's Arc on LOGO- (Spearman and Stephens) that was low budget cable TV -this is film, which is supposed to be a step above cable TV.The premise is cute and does have a different twist than a typical boy- meets-boy gay film which I admire but doesn't deliver. It's kind of like watching a reject episode of a gay Charlie's Angles. It's campy but it doesn't mean to be campy -that is the rub and why it fails.I'm all for gay film and when I lived in L.A., I used to got to a lot of indie film screenings but this one misses the mark. I give it an A for effort but it still feels very low budge....

I bought this movie because I liked the trailer, which I saw as an extry in another movie's DVD. It actually seemed really interesting and funny, and with a hot guy in it, and it had quite a different plot for a gay movie, so I decided to buy it. The movie drags on, it's not entertaining enough. There are a number of very funny scenes, especially the last one, very reminiscent of classic cop movies, the mother, etc but these are not even well made and just make you yearn for the originals. I could not wait for it to be over. It's really pretty boring. One special note: the lighting is horrible. For instance the very first scene at Pip's, it looks like there was no lighting at all for a movie and they were relying on the (bad) spot lighting in the room. It could have been better. PS: how on earth are there so many stellar reviews on here??

This was a fun movie. I'm not going to pretend I'm some movie reviewer and comment on the acting or the cinematography - that's so pompous. I watch a lot of gay movies and I know what I like, and I definitely liked this one! It made me laugh, it was sexy at times, and most of all it kept me interested. The two lead actors had good chemistry together and it was fun to root for them to get back together. For some reason, there are so many dark and depressing gay films, so it was refreshing to watch this rom-com- "thriller". Check it out! Unless you've got a major stick up your backside (like some reviewers on here) you'll love it!

Last night Charles and I attended the FilmOut San Diego screening of Hot Guys with Guns, a special event at the Birch North Park Theatre advertised as an action movie for the Gay male audience, a sort of spoof of the James Bond mythos that judging from the advance publicity was going to be a film about a super-spy attempting to foil some horrendous international crime scheme and – this being aimed at a Gay male audience – in the process bedding an assortment of "Bond boys" instead of "Bond girls." Actually the film turned out to be considerably better than that, owing quite a bit less to James Bond and more to the 1960's TV series I Spy, particularly in the pairing of a white and a Black character as the leads and the rather diffident relationship between the two – the white guy more impulsive and daring, the Black guy more reasoned and "cool."After a marvelous credits sequence using Warren's song under a set of visuals cribbed from the 1960's Bond movies, the original I Spy credits and just about every other 1960's film in the genre, the opening scene turned out to be a decent-looking but decidedly not hot middle-aged man awakening from a drugged stupor with a lot of younger and hotter but similarly indisposed bodies draped across his bed. It turns out his stupor wasn't his idea; he threw a sex party but it was crashed by two interlopers, one dressed in a black hoodie and a death's-head mask and the other more or less au naturel, who entered it and set off an aerosol bomb containing a mixture of party drugs and anesthetics to put the entire crowd under so they could rob them. The principals turn out to be Danny Lohman (Marc Anthony Samuel), a Black Gay actor who's taking a course on how to be a private detective – not because he wants to do that for a living but because he's up for a part as a P.I. in a TV series called Crime and Punishment; and his ex-partner Patrick "Pip" Armstrong (Brian McArdle, whose other main credit on IMDb.com is a voice-over narration for a documentary called It Is No Dream about Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism), a spoiled rich white kid who lives with his mother Patricia (a wonderful bitch-goddess performance by Joan Ryan) and dumped Danny for another aspiring actor, Robin (Trey McCurley), who's hot-looking but is enough of an airhead we in the audience definitely get the impression he's trading down. When Pip is a guest at the next sex party that gets hit by the mystery bandits with their drug bomb, and his Rolex watch (important to him because it's the only legacy left to him by his father, who abandoned the family for reasons we're never told) and his car are stolen (and the car is recovered, stripped and covered with anti-Gay graffiti), Danny decides they should use the skills he's learning in detective class and solve the crime themselves.Despite saddling it with the silly title that makes it sound like a hard-core porn film, Spearman manages to pull off something that's eluded a lot of more prestigious and better-known directors: he manages to fuse comedy and drama so the mystery and the satire reinforce each other instead of clashing. There's also a marvelously funny sequence in which, staking out the home of one of the victims, Danny starts delivering a voice-over narration in the persona of the P.I. character he's auditioning to play on TV – and the dialogue is a perfectly turned parody of Raymond Chandler's prose, particularly his penchant for blender-mixed metaphors. "Hot Guys with Guns" is a quite capably produced and written mystery, well acted by a strong ensemble cast, though Marc Anthony Samuel in the lead stands out. With Denzel Washington already having aged out of the Black juvenile category and Will Smith rapidly following suit, Samuel, playing a part Spearman wrote for himself but at the last minute realized he was too old for, looks like a good candidate to take over these parts.