It takes a lot to make me intensely dislike a movie featuring Anna Kendrick; she's one of the few people for which i'll watch a movie just to see her. That makes it all the more disappointing that Mr. Right is such a colossally inept film. Nobody should waste money on this trainwreck. The plotting is inane, the characterizations are inconsistent at best, baffling at worst. Several moments in the film made me audibly groan, or throw my hands up in bewilderment. This is one of the rare times where you wonder how exactly someone greenlighted a script this misguided.
Our protagonist is Martha (Anna Kendrick), a down on her luck girl who catches her boyfriend cheating in the second scene of the movie. This triggers the usual fall down/get back up romantic comedy arc. Even before meeting her eventual love interest, the movie is filled with problems in Martha's characterization. She reacts to the breakup by getting drunk in a closet, and then going to work with her roommate Sophie (Katie Nehra) so that she can play with the animals at the pet store. No, seriously - Martha and her roommate re-enact take-your-child-to-work-day, because apparently that's a something that calms down Martha. It's one thing to depict a character as somewhat insecure or emotionally unstable, but Mr. Right pushes this pathos to an unbearable limit. The movie seems to think that presenting Martha as an infantile woman-child somehow makes her endearing or relatable.
At said work, Martha puts on cat ears (that are meant to entertain the children that enter the store), and wears them to a convenience store, where she meets her rebound, Francis (Sam Rockwell). The catch, and premise of the movie, is that Francis is an assassin. However, Francis is no normal assassin - he kills the people that hire him, in order to teach them lessons about murdering people. And just like Martha wears cat ears throughout the movie for no discernible reason, Francis wears a clown nose when he kills his clients for reasons that are never explained. If all this sounds silly to you, that's because it is. When Martha meets Francis, he hits on her, and Martha acts creeped out. As in, not only does Martha explicitly call out Francis for being creepy, but Kendrick plays the scene like she personally feels genuinely creeped out by the awkwardness of the script. Absolutely nothing about this interaction indicates that Martha is charmed, or really anything other than uncomfortable; so naturally, she agrees to go on a date with Francis.
Francis and Martha eventually hit it off; apparently the fact that he likes wearing a clown nose and keeps joking about killing people doesn't scare her off. They have a dinner that goes well, save for the part where Francis has to go into the back alley to kill a man trying to kill him. In both the convenience store and this fight sequence, Francis displays preternaturally gifted reflexes. This is eventually explained when they go back to Martha's apartment and Sam teaches Martha how to catch knives in midair. The way Francis explains it, nature has some sort of flow, and you can either go with or against that flow. I would attempt to explain it better, but that's literally the extent to which the movie explains it. Martha spontaneously decides to "go with the flow" or whatever it is, and immediately gains the ability to catch knives. Apparently in this movie's universe, spidey sense is a totally normal skill that normal people can pick up, even though nothing else in the movie indicates anything surreal about the world.
Besides the nondescript romance there are two other main narrative threads. The first involves a man named Hopper (Tim Roth) trying to capture Francis. Hopper apparently works for some organization that Francis used to work for before becoming a reverse-assassin. I would provide more details if the movie did. The other major subplot involves a pair of brothers (James Ransone and Anson Mount) trying to hire Francis to kill someone else. Once again, I would provide more detail if I could, but there's literally no explanation of who these people are, whom they want killed, or why they want this mystery person killed. Notice a trend? There's very little that this movie can be bothered to explain.
The brothers send a middleman to hire Francis on their behalf, and Francis shoots him in front of Martha (while remembering to wear the all-important clown nose). Francis saunters back to the car, with no expectation of any consequences or reaction. What follows is a watershed moment for the film: for the first and last time, Martha exhibits rational adult behavior. She breaks up with Francis and asks to go home. How long does this pinnacle of sensibility last? Shockingly, not very long.
Hopper eventually finds Martha; posing as an FBI agent, he explains Sam's reverse-assassin schtick. Hopper then leaves to look for Francis. Francis tranquilizes Hopper and takes the most logical action possible: he brings the sedated body back to Martha's apartment in an attempt to win her back. At first Martha is perplexed by the absurdity of this; but at the drop of a hat she decides that she is intensely attracted to Sam's seedy way of life. In a movie filled with sins, this might be the worst of them all. When I say "at the drop of a hat", I mean she literally decides out of nowhere to completely flip her character upside down, like some soft of manic-depressive mood swing. Up to this point, there is NOTHING in the movie to suggest that this is a choice Martha might plausibly make. There's never anything to suggest that Martha is morally loose, or that she craves living on the edge, or that she is a misanthropic psychopath. Sure she's shown to be impulsive and childlike, but that hardly suggests she would be turned on by murder. This isn't an organic or logical extension of her fleshed-out personality traits - it's a nonsensical shift that is convenient to the flimsy excuse for a plot. Truthfully, the ONLY thing the movie does to hint at the legitimacy of this decision is at the beginning of the movie. Speaking to a handheld camera, grade-school Martha declares that she wants to grow up to be a dinosaur (a fact Martha references later, because she's a grade-schooler trapped in an adult's body). So perhaps the movie intends to show that by embracing Sam, Martha is unleashing her inner dinosaur? I swear I'm not making this up, although I wish I were. I better move on before my remaining brain cells melt.
Sophie, reaffirming her status as the only character from planet Earth, points out the absurdity of the situation, and tries to talk Martha out of this insane decision. So of course Martha responds logically by locking Sophie in a closet and leaving with Francis. The two get ambushed, and Martha gets kidnapped; younger brother Von comes up with the brilliant plan of keeping Martha as bait so that Sam will kill older brother Richard to rescue her, thus giving Von some unidentified benefit. Or something. Sam saves here, Martha graduates from loving a hit man to killing people herself, and there's a lot of fighting action, none of which is particularly entertaining, and none of which makes any of the plot holes any more understandable. Martha becomes Francis's partner in crime, and finally brings this godforsaken piece of junk to a close.
What's really disappointing is that Mr. Right had potential! When I heard about it, I thought it would be a winking satire. I thought by manufacturing an exaggerated situation, Mr. Right could've skewered the fact that so many romantic comedies pass off creepy or even sociopathic behavior as charming. Instead Mr. Right takes its absurd premise completely seriously, with no self-awareness of its own inanity. And if the film did insist on playing it straight, it should've done away with with the ludicrous reverse-hitman nonsense; it should've made Martha an adult instead of a woman-child; and most importantly, it should've developed her character in a consistent manner so that her fascination wit the assassin life isn't a complete non-sequitur. In this scenario, Francis and Martha's attraction to each other and to murder could reveal insights about their personalities and the nature of romance. Quentin Tarantino would've hada field day with this script. But alas, Mr. Right never utilizes its pulpy DNA for anything more than a joke. The result is a movie with incomprehensibly bad plotting and horrid writing. I was pretty critical of American Ultra last year, but somehow Mr. Right proves that American Ultra could have, in fact, done much much worse. I'm not even sure this movie compares favorably to Gigli. I had pretty much assumed Mother's Day was a lock for best movie of 2016, but it looks like it'll have stiff "competition" for that "accomplishment" (I suppose Mr. Right is Bernie to Mother's Day's Hilary). That's all a long way of saying that Mr. Right doesn't deserve a spot in any box office, but it deserves a section on this wiki page. Anna Kendrick's committed performance is noble but quixotic, as this is a role that is in no way worthy of her talents (For what it's worth, which isn't much, I think Dreama Walker's combination of naiveté and enthusiasm might've been a better fit for the role, at a fraction of the cost). Hopefully she never again gets trapped in such a shockingly incompetent disaster.
Grade: 2/10
