Not every big action vehicle is destined for greatness or even meant to be noteworthy in a star’s filmography. The genre’s brighter moments are practically elevated by the scrapheap of such forgotten movies, which are sometimes purely memorable for a snazzy kick here or an inspired twist there. But it’s no fun when what should be innocuous is barely even trying—“The Man from Toronto,” which pairs Woody Harrelson and Kevin Hart with the director of “Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard,” is such an annoying case. The Netflix movie thrives on schtick, with lazy filmmaking that reminds you just how much its charm relies on low expectations across the board.
In action movies, Kevin Hart usually plays guys who are way out of their element and prone to dopeyness (the “Jumanji” movies, and even his appearance in “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw“). But this script treats his capacity for dumb as a contrivance, instead of making it an endearing, underdog quality, like a good comedy can. Hart’s character, Teddy, is a wannabe entrepreneur who is so dumb he tries to invent shadow-boxing but just calls it “no contact boxing”; he’s so dumb that he prints out the getaway Airbnb address for him and his wife Lori (Jasmine Mathews) but he can’t read it because of low printer toner; he’s so dumb that he uses said confusing piece of paper instead of consulting his smartphone, where the correct information would be available. Because of this mistake, Teddy ends up at the wrong address, in the middle of a torture site, only to find out he is being welcomed as the torturer. The scowling baddies inside the Virginia cabin think Teddy, carrying a wistful bottle of lube and bottle of champagne, is the Man from Toronto, who will extract information from a bleeding man begging for his life.
The actual Man from Toronto, a cold-blooded Canuck killer known by that code name, is played by Woody Harrelson with a grimace and deadly stare. He’s the most infamous of hitmen, and an opening sequence shows us the way he can spin his childhood trauma—watching his grandfather being eaten alive by a bear—into a threat for someone he’s about to torture. But it’s telling to the movie’s limits with schtick that this title character is far from an intriguing mystery; he’s more about providing the concrete contrast to Hart’s wacky inflatable tube performance when they are eventually paired together.
Both Harrelson and Hart are on auto-pilot, and the jokes that arrive from their opposing dynamic—Harrelson’s cold-blooded nature going up against Hart’s squeaking terror—become quickly monotonous. And both men have their own insecurities, which make for yawning moments in which they try to help each other emotionally as the movie posits their machismo as unbalanced: how Teddy suffers from really following his dreams, or how TMFT is actually a shy guy (a quality brought out by Kaley Cuoco in a thankless role that mostly involves her in a cringing double-date scene).
READ MORE: Woody Harrelson Replaces Jason Statham Opposite Kevin Hart In ‘The Man From Toronto’
The script, by Robbie Fox and Chris Bremner (story by Fox and Jason Blumenthal), has an inspired idea by using the “wrong man” storytelling device for the hunter, instead of the usual hunted. In a convoluted course of events that involve a Venezuelan coup and very few people knowing what the Man From Toronto actually looks like, Teddy has to keep pretending to be the Man From Toronto making a rare public appearance, while Harrelson’s character tries to tell him what to say, and how to be intimidating, through an earpiece. It makes for a few scenes that really stretch how long we can watch Hart do his fake-macho thing, like trying to sound tough when we know he’s one gross action from breaking character and screaming.
“The Man from Toronto” could have been sharper with much more care all around, but a glaring problem comes from how Hughes isn’t a funny filmmaker. He might have the self-awareness to slap his name on a food processing plant that hosts the movie’s climactic kill, but his sense of making an action scene comedic is seriously lacking. And when he goes for special effects to enhance the physical comedy—like a car barreling into frame and hitting a character—the graphics are so lackluster it can’t even be called cartoonish. There’s one instance in which Hart and Harrelson are blown out of a building. The physics and CGI are equally shoulder-shrugging, and the editing cuts the moment just to get this junky excuse of a joke over with.
Hughes saves any chance to impress for a single action sequence later in the film. It’s the third act, the script’s crummy world-building has introduced other broadly designed assassins (like the Man from Tokyo, carrying a samurai sword, or the gun-toting, truck-drivin’ Men from Tacoma Brothers), and the fight comes to Teddy’s home gym. The camera runs around a slippery Hart and energized Harrelson in a long-running sequence, made of extended takes to look more or less like one, and it gives the two actors more of a showcase for their hand-to-hand finesse. At the very least, these approximately five minutes from “The Man From Toronto” at least put a little faith into Hughes’ upcoming Netflix remake of “The Raid,” that he will try to honor the original’s nifty, fluidly executed ass-kicking. That’s about the best you can get from “The Man from Toronto”—a clue that maybe Hughes and company will care more about a future movie than this thoroughly indifferent self-assignment. [D+]
“The Man from Toronto” is available now on Netflix.