MASHUP OF ACTION FILM, ROM-COM DOESN’T WORK
Disparate, undercooked genres never find a balance, writes Matt Bobkin.
It’s a tale of two undercooked films that abruptly becomes one undercooked film in Mr. Right, a romantic comedy that violently collides with an action thriller. Before aimless 20-something Martha (Anna Kendrick), and hit man-with-a-heart Francis (Sam Rockwell), bump into each other (literally, of course), the film juggles between millennial rom-com and mediocre action flick, but neither story feels full. The main motivation to keep going is the obvious threat of the two worlds finally meeting, but once Rockwell crosses over into the rom-com side of things, the gang violence scenes do nothing but halt momentum.
Having two juxtaposed halves of the film, while an inspired artistic choice to which the film fully commits, only serves to create uneven pacing, with Francis as an unsatisfying link. While there are moments of Edgar Wright-like foreshadowing of a grisly bloodbath in Martha’s early scenes, they ultimately go unrewarded, alluding to a smarter execution of the eventual melding of the two styles than what eventually takes place.
Unfortunately, neither Kendrick nor Rockwell’s characters provide a protagonist worth caring about. Martha’s primary motivation in the film is to do whatever she can to dole out baffling non sequitur after baffling non sequitur. She’s quirky for the sake of being quirky, and isn’t given much to do other than react to things with disaffected disgust. Rockwell’s character, on paper, is fantastically fresh: a CIA-trained killer with superhuman reflexes who hates killing but can’t stop doing it.
Yet, there’s an unsettling sleaziness to Francis, who’s played as if he were the love child of David Spade and Seann William Scott: all bravado, but with no underlying charm.
The film’s best moments are courtesy of Wu-Tang Clan rapper RZA, whose role as gangster Shotgun Steve serves as the film’s heart and funny bone. While the other gangsters are boorish and unremarkable, rendered little more than contorted faces with guns, RZA inhabits Steve with a smart affability — he’s the only character I wanted to survive the bloodbath — while also being the film’s chief chuckle-maker. Tim Roth also does a great job as the mysterious, accent-switching agent Hopper; though his character’s journey over the course of the film is clumsily handled, more informed by Francis’s feelings than anything we see in the film itself.
It’s an uneven effort that not even Kendrick and Rockwell can make sense of for an audience.