A film review by Craig J. Koban July 6, 2022

THE MAN FROM TORONTO ½ 

2022, R, 110 mins.

Kevin Hart as Teddy  /  Woody Harrelson as Randy "The Man from Toronto"  /  Kaley Cuoco as Anne   /  Jasmine Mathews as Ruth  /  Lela Loren as Daniella /  Pierson Fodé as The Man from Miami  /  Jencarlos Canela as Agent Santoro 

ORIGINAL FILM

Very few films that I've seen as of late have annoyed me to no end as much as THE MAN FROM TORONTO.  

Filmed three years ago with Sony Pictures backing it, the film was then shelved (as so many have been for the last few years due to pandemic woes), but for a looooooog time before the studio probably knew what a dog with fleas that they had, leading to them selling the distribution rights to Netflix, which unceremoniously released it to the streaming masses and without much fanfare a week-plus ago.  Typically speaking, when a film is in the can and sits for as long as THE MAN FROM TORONTO did then it's usually the qualitative kiss of death.  Make no mistake about it: this is an woefully insipid film on many levels.  

But its aggressive mediocrity didn't annoy me, though.  

Something else did.  

A lot. 

This film is called THE MAN FROM TORONTO, but aside from a few shots here and there of the titular Canadian city, virtually none of the events of this story transpire there.  There is a character from, yes, Toronto, but the city is largely nowhere to be found.  Beyond that, the film takes place mostly in cities as far ranging as Washington, Virginia, and Miami...and with Toronto (and some of its surrounding cities) being used to double for those aforementioned American ones (which - as far as I can see - is a crushingly ironic creative move).  But I haven't got to the mind numbingly annoying aspect of THE MAN FROM TORONTO: When nearly every single character in this film pronounces Toronto it frustrated me to no end and literally made me want to throw something at the screen.  No one pronounces it in a regionally accurate way that any Canadian - or person actually living in Toronto - would on a daily basis.  Everyone here...literally...pronounces...every...letter...of the word.  It always methodically comes out as TUH-RON-TOH (with emphasis on the last three letters).  As a Great White Northerner of four-decades-plus, I can tell you that most of us up here pronounce it as TRAWNA...or some iteration of that.  No Canadian pronounces the last T.  Even the spies in ARGO  that were impersonating Canucks wisely reminded viewers of that.  Yet, all characters in THE MAN FROM TORONTO do...and it drove me mad. 

Like...they say it like...over...and over...and over again.  If THE MAN FROM TORONTO was a drinking game and you had to take a shot for every horrible mispronunciation of the city then you'd be drunk within the first half hour.   

Am I overreacting?  Perhaps.  But this just...got to me.  Every time.  All the time.  It's TRAWNA...GODDAMIT!  Not TUH-RON-TOH. 

Even the man from Toronto in THE MAN FROM TORONTO can't pronounce Toronto right.  

I mean...Jesus. 

Anyhoo' - rant over.  THE MAN FROM TORONTO (whoops... TUH-RON-TOH) features Kevin Hart playing the umpteenth variation of the same stock and increasingly getting stale Hart-ian type: The irritating motormouthed loser with a heart of gold that bumbles his way through life.  Hart has demonstrated in some of his past films that he can be a charming on-screen presence, but within the first few minutes of THE MAN FROM TUH-RON-TOH I found myself hard pressed to wonder whether or not I would be able to tolerate his character here for what I assumed would be 90 minutes.  Then I paused my stream to discover that the film was 110 minutes, which made me want to assume the fetal position and cry.  Hart plays Teddy, a failed salesmen that has spent a better part of his life pitching brain dead ideas, like, for instance, a gym that specializes in "contactless boxing."  You read that right: contactless...boxing.  One of the early scenes in this film regarding this is quite telling.  Teddy speaks to his boxing ring boss, who hired him to make some marketing brochures for the gym, but Teddy blew his employer's money on promoting contactless boxing.  Teddy thinks it's wonderful, whereas his boss rightfully says that it already exists in the form of shadow boxing...and it is the dumbest idea that he has even been pitch.   

Obviously, he's never been pitched the premise of THE MAN FROM TUH-RON-TOH. 

Teddy decides that the best course of action to make himself and his wife (Jasmine Matthews) feel better about his constant career failures is to take both of them on a romantic weekend out to a cabin in the woods.  In pure sitcom contrivance fashion, the sad sack that is Teddy accidentally scopes out the wrong cabin and inside finds a beaten and bloodied man hung up and gagged with a torturer in tow...and there's another torturer to come in the form of - yup - the so-called "Man From Tuh-ron-toh (Woody Harrelsen, about as Canadian as Uncle Sam), who's a world renowned and deeply feared skilled assassin.  In a weird move, Teddy begins to improvise (remember, this is a Kevin Hart comedy vehicle as well) and begins to impersonate TMFT (sorry, I can't type The Man From Tuh-ron-toh anymore), which obviously makes the real TMFT rather upset.  Miraculously (and via some preposterous scripting machinations), Teddy's bluff works, but his worst day ever gets even worse-er when the FBI learns of this and wants him to work with them and continue the charade.  Unfortunately, this all leads to the real TMFT catching up with Teddy, but instead of murder-death-killing him on the spot, this cold as ice mass murderer decides to use Teddy for his purposes and forms an perplexing partnership with him.   TMFT makes a deal with Teddy: If he helps him he can go back to his normal, boring life.  All TMFT wants is enough money to leave killing behind to start is own restaurant.   

Wacky and violent hijinks ensue.  And, to be sure, from this point on we get about 70-80 minutes of characters saying - sigh - Tuh-ron-toh a lot to the point of me wanting to jab a pencil in my eye. 

Poor Harrelson.  If you think that the Texas born actor never once makes for a plausible Tuh-ron-toh-ian then wait for me to blow your mind with the original actor hired for the role: the British born Jason Statham.  The TRANSPORTER star was wise enough to abandon ship after creative differences abounded, and can you really blame him?  I'm guessing that Statham probably realized that he's never done a character accent outside of his British one, so playing a Canuck from Ontario would have been involved some serious suspension of disbelief.  Harrelson does what he can with the middling to awful material given to him, and he attempts to generate some sort of oddball chemistry with Hart.  But so much of THE MAN FROM TUH-RON-TOH is riddled with the most tired of mismatched buddy film formulas that it becomes really hard to care about Teddy...or TMFT...or anyone else for that matter.  Both of these people will go through radical character transformations.  TMFT will have his heart warmed and yearn to retire to a place of normalcy, whereas Teddy will segue from a pathetic whiner to an empowered man of action.  The only potentially juicy aspect of the script comes in the form of TMFT's secret handler (always shown from behind or in silhouette through most of the film), but the casting of this character is pretty easily given away when you hear her voice, which renders said mystery all but null and void.   

THE MAN FROM TUH-RON-TOH was directed by Patrick Hughes, who helmed last year's categorically wretched and nearly unwatchable sequel THE HITMAN'S WIFE'S BODYGUARD.  His latest doesn't succumb to that effort's stunning badness, and there's perhaps one sequences near the final tail end here that deserves some points of creative choreography and editing.  It's an extended one-shot brawl between TMFT and a squadron of bad guys in Teddy's gym, and it's the only section of the film that woke me up out of apathy and got me invested.  Beyond that, THE MAN FROM TUH-RON-TOH is a double dip offender as far as action comedies go: It's neither once amusing in any consistent way or exciting at all.  This is as blandly unoriginal as any film from 2022 and is a low, low point for a genre that I usually get into under the right circumstances.  And the film is one big orchestrated lie to the audience.  Anyone looking for an entertaining slice of Canadiana will have to look elsewhere.  THE MAN FROM TUH-RON-TOH made me want to stop my stream PRONTO and never finish it.