Mark Reviews Movies: THE MAN FROM TORONTO (2022)

The Man from Toronto, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 24, 2022

The premise of The Man from Toronto, in which a complete fool and almost-total screw-up is repeatedly and consistently mistaken for a deadly international hitman, makes little sense and doesn't hold up to even the slightest of scrutiny. It's a comedy, though, so we can forgive Robbie Fox and Chris Bremner's screenplay for taking some license with believability in order to arrive at its gimmick. As for the actual execution of that comedic conceit, well, the human capacity for forgiveness has its limits.

Here, Kevin Hart plays Teddy, a wannabe sales representative, as well as aspiring ideas guy, whose ability to sell anything is almost non-existent, while his ideas are junk. Director Patrick Hughes' movie shows itself to be straining its abilities almost immediately, as it opens with a montage of Teddy making videos of homemade exercise equipment that repeatedly fail.

Instead of simply letting Teddy's faults and basic character come through by way of the story, the movie instantly relies on Hart's skills to make a big show of how inept his character is. One of the unfortunate trends in Hollywood comedies as of late is the reliance on comedic actors to bolster a high-concept story with familiar shtick and improvisation. When the introduction to the main character and central story of this movie is founded upon that creative shortcut, it does not bode well.

As for this story's high-concept conceit, it revolves around the eponymous character, a professional assassin played by Woody Harrelson. The Man from Toronto, henceforth referred to only as "Toronto," is infamous in criminal circles for his ability to get people to talk, thanks to promises of removing organs—such as eyes and skin—as part of interrogation/torture methods. The movie's treatment of these gruesome—one might call them grisly, on account of their origins from Toronto's tragic childhood—tactics, by the way, is more than a bit dishonest, since the character eventually has to show a more sensitive and sympathetic side for his existence to still exist in the movie's strangely light-hearted tone.

Many may have forgotten by now, but Harrelson, too, is a comedian at heart. To the actor's benefit, though, his shtick in this case is meant to be far more restrained, as the deadpan, malicious straight man to Hart's motor-mouthed energy. In theory, the mismatched pairing of these characters and the actors' respective comedic styles should work, and on a foundationally theoretic level, it more or less does. It's just too bad the screenplay leaves it to the two of them to fill in the jokey gaps between the plot and action beats.

Teddy ends up mistaken for Toronto after arranging a weekend trip to a small town as a birthday present for his wife Lori (Jasmine Matthews). Reading the wrong address for their rental cabin, Teddy coincidentally finds himself at a different cabin, where a pair of men are expecting Toronto to torture information out of a man. The FBI raids the place before any real damage is done, and while the feds intrinsically know that Teddy isn't a cold-blood killer, they come up with a plan to have him impersonate Toronto around a bunch of suspicious criminals in order to uncover a terrorist plot. It doesn't make a lick of sense, but it's an excuse for the fish-out-of-water and, when Toronto tracks down Teddy to use him to accomplish his own mission, unlikely-couple tale, nonetheless.

The rest features a lot of further misunderstandings, a few awkward situations in which the basically decent Teddy pretends to be intimidating, a globe-trotting plot to learn the terrorists' plans, and some action sequences, as Toronto's handler (played by Ellen Barkin) sends other Men from Various Places to get the job done. As for the comedy, there's a real tonal disconnect, between the suggested potential for violence and the attempted silliness, in these scenes—as well as a more basic level of disconnect in that absence of believability (Teddy's bumbling and fumbling seems unlikely to fool any of these criminals). As for the action, Hughes sells that slightly better, with a perilous shootout/chase on balconies and hanging art pieces, a close-quarters fight in a storage closet, and a climactic brawl between hitmen, which is falsely presented as a one-take and too distracting in its artifice to make good on the chaos and use of various props and weapons.

Of course, that leaves much of the movie's goals with the comic skills of Hart and Harrelson. They're fine and occasionally funny in The Man from Toronto, showing far more investment in material that doesn't offer much in return.

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