Mr. Right (2016) Review!!!

Synopsis – A girl falls for the “perfect” guy, who happens to have a very fatal flaw: he’s a hitman on the run from the crime cartels who employ him.

My Take – When the first dismal trailers of this action comedy came online, this just seemed like a film which is trying too hard on cash in on the presence of Anna Kendrick and Sam Rockwell, who have often been the lone bright spot in otherwise dismal movies. But to my surprise this Max Landis written and Paco Cabezas directed film is an actually hilarious comedy that never panders to its imagined audience as so many American comedies do and is just a straight up funny typical romantic comedy mixed with action. It’s predictable and clunky but it’s really fun because of its stars and hilarious writing. It’s true! While the story is absurd, the two just put on their charisma on even on the lamest conversations and turn into charming quirky mashup of romantic comedy and hit-man thriller. Yet, the film wears its derivative junkiness on its sleeve with surprising lightness of authority. The story follows Martha (Anna Kendrick) is stuck in a rut after recently catching her boyfriend cheating on her (amusingly, he attempts to spin the conflict into a three-way). She appears to be one of those young women who are, perhaps, too eager to please men, as we initially meet Martha in the midst of a frenzied montage in which she attempts to look her sexiest while making a disastrous dinner. Enter Francis (Sam Rockwell), a supernaturally agile assassin for hire who’s recently developed a conscience, and is now tracking down and killing his clientele—sometimes while wearing a red clown nose, for no particular reason.

While eluding an angry assortment of former associates—led by a man named Hopper (Tim Roth) —he winds up in New Orleans, where he has a chance meeting with Martha. She’s kooky, she’s scatterbrained, she’s wearing cat ears (because she’s helping out in her friend’s pet-adoption agency), and when she demonstrates lightning-quick reflexes at a convenience store, he senses a kindred spirit. He asks her out on the spot. It’s a classic boy meets girl film, and it promises dance violence and romance. Director Paco Cabezas‘s film fuses two predominant romantic-comedy fantasies, one of which caters to women, the other flattering men. On one hand, the film is a fantasy of Prince Charming swooping in to save the day and actualize the female lead. On the other, it’s a story of a chick who unconditionally accepts a screwed-up dude’s morally challenging eccentricities. The film reveals these two rom-com modes to be essentially the same, as both revel in the idea of someone instantly understanding us—a common daydream, which somehow glorifies and reduces us simultaneously. The film plays in part as a whirlwind romance—like Before Sunrise, but with gun play. As Francis and Martha spend a few days getting to know each other, the movie functions like a satire of the breezy conversations new couples have when they’re nervously trying to impress each other. The difference is that when Martha says that she’s a luckless ditz, she’s not exaggerating, and when Francis jokes that he just had to step out into the alley for a minute to kill a guy, he’s not kidding. Francis’s profession is obviously a metaphor for the shames we each carry, which have to be transcended to trust someone else enough to let them into our lives. Francis is an assassin, while Martha’s a jilted girlfriend, and the ghoulish false equivalency that’s drawn between these two facts hints at a satirical dimension that Cabezas and screenwriter Max Landis don’t fully explore. The film is thin because it coasts on obvious contrasts and reversals, particularly Martha’s ease with Francis’s underworld warfare. The difference between this movie and the ones it’s imitating—besides that it’s arriving about 20 years past this style’s heyday—is that Quentin Tarantino, and similar writers and directors know when to pivot from darkly comic to genuinely cutting.

The film never makes that turn. The film has more attitude than ideas. It’s a movie where the heroine gets upset when she sees her new boyfriend execute a man, and he tries to calm her down by saying, “Baby, how I feel about that guy has nothing to do with how I feel about you.” Landis and Cabezas try to balance bloody gun play and screwball banter in ways that recall the likes of Something Wild and True Romance, but without any of those films’ inspired genius. Still, for those willing to accept the film as just a derivative blood-soaked goof, only ever meant to be momentarily diverting, it’s really enjoyable. Most of the jokes truly deliver, such as Francis and Martha meeting in a convenience store, in a sequence that’s shot in slow motion as condoms rain from the ceiling. The scene scans as a parody of the sexual urge that’s often suppressed in Prince Charming fantasies, which are generally and hypocritically chaste, but it’s also suggestively WTF arbitrary. Slow motion is also used in several of the action scenes, usually to highlight the ludicrousness of tropes that we accept as givens in many thrillers. The filmmakers lump the clichés that we associate with rom coms and action films together in a spray of tangy taste that hits its targets like buckshot: broadly and inconsistently, but mostly effectively. The charms of Anna Kendrick and Sam Rockwell will always be visible in whatever film they do. The film gets that and takes advantage of that as they both continue to deliver on their most interesting performances on film these days. Tim Roth is fleetingly funny as a mob boss pretending to be an FBI agent, complete with ridiculously exaggerated accent and RZA has a couple of amusing scenes as an assassin who gradually comes around to Francis’ point of view toward his employers. And while the budding relationship between Francis and Martha is no more believable than the characters themselves are, it is easy to buy Kendrick and Rockwell together. On the whole, ‘Mr. Right’ is a very enjoyable comedy made watchable by its two delightful actors doing their best to entertain despite its forgettable plot.