There’s little or no Toronto in “The Man From Toronto.” There’s the enduring CN Tower, seen solely in a distant establishing shot of the twilit skyline, and some pictures of a distant hide-out someplace on the outskirts of city, earlier than our Canadian hit man hero (Woody Harrelson) is known as away on a mission, and the motion strikes elsewhere — Minnesota, Puerto Rico, the suburbs of Virginia.
Paradoxically, the film was filmed virtually completely in Ontario, so Toronto, its capital — in addition to Hamilton, Milton and Brampton — will regularly present up disguised as someplace else. When Harrelson chases Teddy (Kevin Hart), a bumbling health buff embroiled in an assassination plot due to a case of mistaken identification, they’re truly cruising beneath downtown Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway — not the streets of Washington, D.C. Nobody within the solid even manages to pronounce “Toronto” appropriately.
“Geographic license is often an alibi for laziness,” Thom Andersen as soon as noticed in his feature-length essay movie “Los Angeles Performs Itself.” In “The Man From Toronto,” directed by Patrick Hughes, the obscure sense of location is typical of a broader lack of effort. Though Hart, because the broadly comedian model of the basic Hitchcockian Fallacious Man, has a sure goofball attraction, his frantic coward routine will get outdated shortly, with no considerable change because the action-flick hazard continues to escalate. Harrelson, then again, does little with the function of the unflappable tremendous murderer, enjoying put-upon straight man to Hart’s over-the-top jester with out a lot chemistry.
Because the shoot-em-up carnage builds to an extended one-take struggle sequence in Teddy’s gymnasium — harking back to the spectacular church battle within the 2014 film “Kingsman: The Secret Service,” with much less panache — the general feeling is one among merely going by way of the motions. That’s a disgrace, eh?
The Man From Toronto
Rated PG-13 for crude language, comedian motion and a few graphic violence. Working time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
