MR RIGHT
DIRECTOR: Paco Cabezas
CAST: Anna Kendrick, Sam Rockwell
CLASSIFICATION: 16 LV
RUNNING TIME: 91 minutes
RATING: 3 stars (out of 5)
John DeFore
If you cringe at the scene, early on, in which two new lovebirds hurl knives at each other, each catching the blades in mid-air because they’re just so in tune, feel free to walk out of the cinema: Mr Right is wrong for you.
For viewers who can embrace this fizzy blend of mystic-assassin worship and cutesy at-first-sight romance, though, this action rom-com will be the best thing since Grosse Pointe Blank – thanks mostly to leads Rockwell and Kendrick. A crowd-pleaser despite its missteps and occasionally because of them, the pic enlivens some stale conceits about killers-for-hire and the women who love them.
A grade-school prelude in which a girl announces that she intends to grow up to be a T-Rex foreshadows the wildness lurking inside Martha (Kendrick), who has just dumped her boyfriend and is frightening friends with her drunken plans to “do something terrible”.
Martha doesn’t really get into trouble, though, until she sobers up and attracts the attention of Francis (Rockwell). They meet cute by knocking over a rack of condoms in a store, and the cute keeps coming: by the end of their day-long first date through colourful New Orleans locales, they’re wearing matching T-shirts. Max Landis’s screenplay gives them the kind of self-consciously clever banter that can go awry very easily, but Kendrick and Rockwell are the right actors for this kind of flirting, and build enough momentum to carry the film over the potential speed bumps ahead.
Those obstacles concern Francis’s work. He’s a famous assassin who, a while back, had a moral epiphany about murder. Now he only kills those who want him to kill other people, which means that a lot of his old business associates – like Tim Roth’s Hopper, posing as an FBI agent – want to kill him. Snipers are on his tail even as he courts Martha, and without her noticing it, Francis deftly tangos her out of the line of fire. He’s always dancing, in fact, dodging bullets and attackers’ fists with superhuman grace. As he will eventually explain to Martha, he’s blessed with the ability to feel “this sweeping current” guiding objects through the world, and to flow with it subconsciously. That’s right, fanboys: he’s not just a killer on par with Luc Besson’s Professional, he’s a Jedi.
Martha thinks her suitor’s casual references to killing people are all in fun. When she finally sees him in action, it’s like the moment when you realise your perfect new lover actually does think Donald Trump has good ideas about how to make America great again. She recoils, but changes her mind when she sees the kind of bad guys who are out to get him, and realises they don’t mind kidnapping her to lure him into their sights.
This cutesy romance is about to turn very, very bloody, and the smart move is to let the mayhem play out until our damsel in distress and her Mr Right are reunited. – The Hollywood Reporter
If you liked Knight and Day or Killers, you will like this.