(USA, 90 min.)
Dir. Paco Cabezas, Writ. Max Landis
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Anna Kendrick, Tim Roth, James
Ransone, RZA
 |
| Anna Kendrick and Sam Rockwell star in Mr. Right. Courtesy of VVS Films. |
Trips through the dating world
often bring a little baggage. Maybe a prospective mate has some weird habits,
like eating tin foil or couch cushion stuffing, or perhaps someone seems like
the perfect match until he or she pulls out a bunch of kids that one just isn’t
ready to raise. Alternatively, maybe, like Martha (Anna Kendrick) experiences
when she finds Mr. Right, her perfect man kills people for a living. That’s
some awfully big baggage, but Martha, in typically endearing Anna Kendrick
fashion, brushes off Mr. Right’s blood-spattered shortcoming with a hop, skip,
and a shrug.
Mr. Right’s titular perfect gentleman is Francis (Sam Rockwell), a shaggy dog of a contract killer with a few loose screws and noble intentions. He’s funny, charming, smooth, and just a little creepy, so it’s no wonder that Martha sees him as the ideal rebound for her recent break-up. They click.
Francis, though, kills people for
money. The difference between Francis and ordinary hit-people is that he kills the folks who hire him to whack their foes. It’s some
convoluted logic that makes sense in its own perverse and slightly off-kilter
way. In short, it’s just a carry-on bag for Martha to deal with in the grand
carousel of dating luggage metaphors.
When Mr. Right bumps people off
for a living, though, he inevitably becomes the target of competing baddies.
Enter Von Cartigan (James Ransone), a kooky FBI guy (Tim Roth), and a gummy
bear eating gunman called Shotgun Steve (RZA) and their courtship becomes a
crazy, bullet-ridden adventure. The real test of Martha and Francis’s
relationship is a basic game of survival: kill or be killed, but kill only to
save a life.
Director Paco Cabezas balances
about three different movies swimming together in Mr. Right as Martha and Francis play The Dating Game à la Mr.
& Mrs. Smith. Mr. Right is
a dark and funny caper with a layer of sweetness underneath smatterings of blood.
One almost wishes for Cabezas to amp the crazy up a notch and make Mr. Right both an all-out bloodbath and
completely loony in the vein of Seven
Psychopaths, but the film nevertheless works as a sweetly innocent
anti-rom-com that puts conventional ideas of happily-ever-after in the
crosshairs. The innocence of the romance, similarly, helps the film’s critique of
violence while acknowledging that, like Martha, people sometimes become attracted to the adrenaline-high of violence.
The film dabbles in
self-awareness, too, as the wink-wink humour plays with the mish-mash of
genres. It defies conventions of romantic comedies, but also plays with the
audience’s expectations to leave them hoping for an ending that’s more Pretty Woman than Bonnie & Clyde as Francis’s thug life puts Martha in
trouble—and gives her a taste for living dangerously. Mr. Right’s manic energy sometimes gets the better of it as
stylishly choreographed fights and smokin’ dance moves, and it might be more
annoying than endearing depending on one’s mood, but the performances keep it
on target like two laser sights waltzing around a heart.
Mr. Right works largely thanks to Kendrick’s pitch perfect
pluckiness as Martha. Awkward, funny, and just a bit out of joint, Martha’s
innocence and naïveté sells the convoluted premise that a single
thirtysomething cat lady might blush at the idea of dating a contract killer. Mr. Right adds to Kendrick's claim to be the most likable actress working today since Julia Roberts.
Rockwell’s a lot of fun too in his ruffled performance as Mr. Right. Francis, a
sly operator type, couldn’t be more different from Martha, but it’s case of
opposites becoming attracted to one another as the fire and water of Kendrick
and Rockwell’s enjoyable screen team often hits the money by playing off one another with
slapstick skill. Throw in her kitty hears and his clown nose and Mr. Right gives birth to some
carnivalesque baby that one just can’t help but love.
Mr. Right opens in Toronto at the
Carlton, in Montreal at Dollar Cinema, in Medicine Hat at The Monarch, and on VOD on May 27 from VVS Films.
