Couldn’t they at least pronounce it properly?

Now on Netflix; The Man From Toronto (not Teranta) is actually a passable action comedy premise but ultimately suffers from a lack of self-discipline and storytelling bloat from the filmmaking team.

A case of mistaken identity arises after a screw-up sales consultant and the world’s deadliest assassin – known only as The Man from Toronto – run into each other at a holiday rental.

We’ll gladly admit that The Man From Toronto was only ever designed to be an affable crowd pleaser, but it makes a lot of sense that this film which was scheduled for a theatrical run got sold straight to Netflix as it has way too much bloat and waste to make up for the moments that were at least meant to be fun.

At 110 minutes, this thing was just too damn long.  Jokes get drawn out, set pieces are far too bloated and it’s going out of its way to be something that is just incredibly busy from a visual standpoint.

Director Patrick Hughes does have a decent track record before coming on to this picture but it all seems far too content to mash up the comedy and the action elements rather than letting them standalone like he does in Hitman’s Bodyguard.  This entire film feels like a plate of left overs that we’ve just pulled out the fridge.

Now that’s not necessarily a bad thing as leftovers bring a certain degree of familiarity to them, but you can’t reheat it all.  Sure some of the action sequences work, but it takes far too long to get our stars together to generate just a little bit of comedic chemistry as we slog through an overlong narrative that could have easily lost 20 minutes.  At a lean and mean 85-90 minutes, this would have been a fun little time waster, instead it’s mildly interminable to sit through.

Granted it’s at least partly my fault feeling this way since I tend to really enjoy a fair number of Kevin Hart movies….until I realize that he’s co-staring with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson in them and it dawned on me that he needs a strong co-star to be able to really connect with not just audiences but the material that he is given.  As an actor he’s subpar at best and needs someone to riff with to really make it all work and sadly he doesn’t cross paths with Woody Harrelson until the end of the 1^st act.

We’ll admit that Harrelson and Hart have decent comedic chops together, but Harrelson (who was a replacement for Jason Statham) just feels like he’s slapping on his trademark grumpy face for as long as he has to in order to get the paycheck.  Meanwhile Kaley Cuoco is kind of wasted as the best friend of Hart’s wife and the big reveal of the big villain who we don’t see until the end feels so random that we just don’t care about it.

While The Man From Toronto executes enough of the expected beats of the genre it was just way too bloated from all angles to keep from rising to somewhere just around a middle of the road affair.