The Man From Toronto Review: Hitman Meets Dead Man

The Man from Toronto is a 2022 action, comedy movie starring Kevin Hart and Woody Harrelson. It was funny, had its fair share of action, but the dialogue felt sloppy and the plot was slow. Our two main actors were really good, but this isn’t anything special from Netflix.

The Man from Toronto is worth the watch, but only if you don’t have anything better to watch. It isn’t anything amazing, the action is decent, and the dialogue feels really awkward in the beginning. I really enjoyed the ending, but the beginning was not everything I had expected.

With that being said, I still enjoyed watching this movie, and felt that Kevin Hart and Woody Harrelson performed well.

The Man From Toronto Review

Without a doubt, this was my highlight going into June. While Spiderhead, you can give that review a read here, looked really interesting, I love Kevin Hart. His ability to make almost anything funny has translated so well to the big screen, and I was excited to see what he could do. The first half an hour is a lot of character set-up, establishing teddy as a failure and all that jazz, and that part I didn’t mind. It’s a valuable time chunk that can be interesting and important if done well. The issue I had with the start of The Man from Toronto was the awkwardness of the dialogue. It felt forced, a little bit weird, and it sounded like a script.

It didn’t feel like our characters were having conversations, it felt like they were reading off a piece of paper. It was nowhere near the worst dialogue Netflix has put out, but it was definitely off-putting and a weird start to the movie. The dialogue doesn’t improve a ton as the movie goes, but the action and the plot pick up so it becomes less of a focal point.

Once Woody Harrelson and Kevin Hart make their first appearance on the screen together, the movie gets so much better. The comedy picks up, the action finally gets going, and the movie I expected to see starts to come together. I thought our two starts worked together really well, and the vastly different types of comedy they bring to the table really made for an entertaining watch.

The plot came off as simple in the trailer, but it ended up being slightly wonky, and a little bit all over the place. I don’t want to get into too many spoilers, but we have some characters that seemed sort of important, and then they fell off the face of the earth for a while. No flashes over, not a lot of screen time, nothing. I get that this is a two character movie for the most part, but having a major group of characters fall off the script for a long portion, and then reappear a while later as if that hole didn’t exist. A second smaller storyline would have given a little less screen time to our main characters, but it would have improved the storytelling and taken a little bit of pressure of the main storyline to provide all of the details we need.

Without a doubt, there are some positives to this movie. It’s hilarious, the action is really good, and it is captivating. Some people are going to moan and complain that Kevin Hart is always playing the same archetype, but he does it so well. It’s a funny role, and one that I love to see on screen. Woody Harrelson was both super funny, and super chaotic at the same time. He plays the role of merciless killer so well, but has the range to flip back to a slightly mean life coach when Teddy is struggling the most. The stunts and cinematography at the end was awesome, and it made the last 15 minutes my favourite part. Just when I thought it was over, we got a ton of action and some more of the mid fight dialogue I was missing.

Overall, The Man from Toronto is decent. It’s funny, got some good action, and some good acting. Outside of our co-stars, the acting isn’t that great and the dialogue is sloppy. The plot swings from good to bad to messy and back a couple of times, but it doesn’t distract from the movie too badly. I enjoyed it and think The Man from Toronto is worth a watch. Also how often does Netflix centre a movie around Canada, so gotta support it anyways.