The Man From Toronto – Film Review

In one of the first scenes in Patrick Hughes‘ new film The Man From Toronto, we watch as Kevin Hart‘s character Teddy Jackson try his best to make some inspirational YouTube videos. He is shown to not succeed at helping anyone at all and is essentially seen as a loser in the film. He is the butt of the joke, quite literally, because the residents of his hometown of Yorktown, Virginia, coin the phrase “Teddyed,” which basically means that somebody messed up.

That’s also one of the best ones you can use to describe Hughes’ film. Surely he tried to make a great movie that would make people laugh and have a good time, but he “Teddyed” big time with this one. From the beginning all the way to the end, The Man From Toronto is a soulless, outrageously unfunny film that has Kevin Hart playing the same character yet again, and featuring Woody Harrelson in a hugely miscast role.

Originally, one of the most popular “badass action hero” actors, Jason Statham, was going to star in the film as the titular mysterious assassin, but he eventually left the project due to creative differences. That was a bullet dodged for Statham. Although it’s a good thing for him and his career, having someone like Statham in this role instead would have made the character far more intimidating than he ended up being.

Nothing against Harrelson, but it’s just a little difficult to watch him try to be a brooding badass for nearly two hours. He’s not intimidating in the least, and it almost looked as though he had a cheeky grin about to erupt on his face the entire movie. Him and Harrelson don’t even really share the screen for most of the movie, and even when they do, their chemistry isn’t anything too special.

Hart is, once again, playing the same character that he does in every single one of his films. Meanwhile, Harrelson is playing a hardened assassin who actually gets a surprising in-depth backstory, so it’s really quite difficult to complain about lack of character development here, surprisingly enough. What is lacking here, however, is a competent story. As each scene goes by, it all gets more convoluted than you can possibly imagine.

This film was obviously made in order to make people laugh and have a good time, but for many people, that will be hard simply because of how messy the story is. It’s genuinely hard to follow at times. The action scenes are impressive whenever they happen and the film actually has some strong cinematography from Rob Hardy, but aside from that, The Man From Toronto flops hard as one big “Teddy” for both of these lead actors’ careers.