Mr. Right (2015)

When you have Sam Rockwell and Anna Kendrick, and a promising premise, how can you mess things up? Well, apparently by adding an unrealistic element to the mix and making a movie a little too surreal for ones taste. Therefore, Mr. Right almost hits the mark but misses, despite of the main characters great aim and awesome reflexes.

Be aware, minor spoilers are lurking.

Mr. Right starts off well. We meet Francis (Sam Rockwell), who is a hit-man out to kill those, who have hired him instead. Add some Rockwell dance moves and a red nose, and there is a great promise for a good movie. And meeting Martha (Anna Kendrick) just adds a positive spin to the movie – a girl who has had bad luck with love ever since she can remember. Both are quirky and interesting characters, and the fact that bad guys are after Francis, makes their newly sparkled romance that much intriguing. Then the surreal looking reflexes enter the plot.

For a movie that has human characters, and that doesn’t want to be in the sci-fi or the fantasy genre, Mr. Right takes real life reflexes to a whole new level and it didn’t work. Sure, it could have been awesome for an Unbreakable type of surreal superhero movie, where everything looks mundane, but actually isn’t, but that’s not Mr. Right. It’s a romance comedy that has an element of action thrown in, and that’s what it should have been.

The biggest disappointment regarding that reflex thing, is the fact that they could have left it out, and everything would have worked out just fine. It wasn’t a necessary element to the plot, sure, it helped to save Martha, but that all could have played out differently. What could have been a sweet romance between Francis and Martha, with bad guys chasing them, turned into something ridiculous instead. It’s a shame really, because I really really wanted to love this movie just as much as I love Sam Rockwell. And on the surface it was all lovable, from the cast to the premise, but the need to complicate a simple plot turned the movie into a mess.

On the plus side, Rockwell shines just as well as he always does. He has so much screen presence that it’s hard not to love him. His pairing with Kendrick is great, if you ignored the whole Hollywood leading man love interest age difference, but hey, I’m 4 years younger than Kendrick and I would definitely get on board the Rockwell train. The comedy is there, could have been better of course, but there are some great moments. And despite my hate towards the reflex thing, the visual aspect of it looked good on camera and the fighting scenes were impressive for a rom-com.

The best part of the movie its take on bad guys – sure, they are bad guys, but they don’t want to die! In this particular scene, during the end game of the movie, a bad guy wants to kill Francis but chooses the method of a grenade and when it hits him, that he would kill himself as well, he breaks down. That was one of the funniest moments of the movie, because it was so unexpected! Also, having one of the bad guys turn against his employer, and side with Francis, seemed just the kind of thing a bad guy would do.

So all in all, I liked it, but just because I love Rockwell and his character. And I liked the little comedy bits and bobs in the movie, while I disliked one of the plot elements with all my heart. I shipped Francis and Martha, and I loved seeing Roth in his element. But as a whole, Mr. Right isn’t great, it’s plot a little too messy, and despite the interesting characters, the overall movie was a little too much on the boring side.