‘Mr. Right’ (2016) **/*****
You don’t have to worry about falling for his charms
Anna Kendrick and Sam Rockwell could very well be the two most likable actors currently making movies. They’re charming, they’re attractive, they’re funny, they can handle the weight of serious drama, Kendrick can sing like a bird, Rockwell is an amazing dancer. You’d have to work pretty dang hard to make either one of these adorable pixie sprites unlikable. Would such a thing even be possible? Probably not, because Mr. Right does everything in its power to get that job done, and though it gets very, very close, several times over, it never quite meets that goal.
From director Paco Cabexas and screenwriter Max Landis, Mr. Right is the story of a spitfire of a young lady named Martha (Kendrick), who has continually found herself unlucky in love, and her meeting and potential romance with a charmingly unhinged former hitman named Francis (Rockwell), who has decided to make amends for his past life not by refusing to kill from this point forward, but by killing the people who try to hire him rather than the intended targets. Can the spark of love felt by this quirky but non-murderous gal survive the revelation that her charming but insane new suitor is a serial killer? Will either of them even live long enough to find out now that a pair of criminal brothers (Anson Mount and James Ransone) have decided to use all of the goons at their disposal to take out Rockwell’s hitman before he can get to them? The short answer to these questions is, “Who cares?”
The long answer to these questions is that it’s tough to care, because Mr. Right is an action comedy that gets so many things wrong that it fails as both a hitman movie and as a will they/won’t they comedic romance. The problem is one of tone, as well as one of character. What kind of a movie is Mr. Wrong? To put it into a few words, it’s a broad movie, it’s a silly movie, it’s a goofy movie. It’s a movie that never takes itself seriously, but that somehow is never any fun. It’s a movie that’s very firmly ungrounded in an unreality, but that never actually does anything with its pseudo-fantasy elements, or even explains why they exist. It’s a tonal mess that’s neither juvenile nor mature, that’s neither mainstream nor niche, and it’s really hard to imagine who it was supposed to be for.
The comedy here doesn’t work because its too obvious and hacky. The gags are rapid fire and constant, and they come with punchlines that never subvert your expectations of where a joke might be going. You can see every supposed laugh coming from a mile away before it ever even gets delivered. The effect is something like having your coked up uncle who elbows you in the ribs after every joke he makes over for dinner. The romance doesn’t work because the characters are used to set up cheap jokes so often that they never end up feeling like real people, and who cares if two people are going to end up together if it never even feels for a second like the two people in question could actually exist? The protagonists here aren’t people you’d know in real life so much as they’re prop comics from the 1980s whose comedy specials you’d turn off after five minutes.
The action similarly doesn’t work because, once again, you don’t buy the characters as being real people, so you also never buy that they could actually be in any real danger. Rockwell isn’t just playing a well-trained and highly skilled assassin here, he’s playing a superhero of sorts who can dodge bullets and catch knives that are thrown at his face, by the blade, without cutting himself. And not only can he perform these feats, he can also teach Kendrick’s character to perform them, within a matter of minutes, all because he’s pegged her as some sort of adept. The things they do are so ridiculous that the movie might as well just say that they’re using The Force. The over-the-top nature of the fights that get choreographed also means that a huge amount of what Rockwell’s character does has to be performed by a stuntman, which forces the director to sit the camera a football field or so away from the action while he’s filming it, which ends up looking really ridiculous anyway. Mr. Right is just no good when it comes to laughs, no good when it comes to romance, and no good when it comes to action.
The only reason the film isn’t a complete failure on every level is Kendrick and Rockwell’s extreme talent, bottom line. This movie does everything it can to embarrass them, including putting Kendrick in a pair of kitty ears and Rockwell in a clown nose, but they still manage to make a moment or two matter, here and there. You’ll find yourself laughing at something stupid they say, despite yourself, just because you find their screen presences to be so agreeable. You’ll find yourself affected by a character beat that absolutely shouldn’t work, just based on the strength of a line reading. The RZA is also kind of fun playing a hapless goon, and Tim Roth is absolutely thrilling as a government spook who at one point feigns a whiskey-soaked southern accent, so I guess you could go as far as to say the acting is pretty strong. Pretty strong, despite the fact that the material doesn’t deserve the performers in any respect. Can we get a do-over? Is there any chance we can watch Kendrick and Rockwell do their things together sometime soon in a movie that’s actually good? I don’t know if it would make up for having to sit through Mr. Right, but it would be a start.
