Mr. Right
Dustin Chase
It’s been a bad year for Oscar nominee Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air, Pitch Perfect). She’s already scored one of the worst films of the year, alongside Miles Teller in Get a Job, now Mr. Right is equally terrible. Back in 2007, Kevin Costner starred in a film called Mr. Brooks, that more successfully achieved what this film aims to do. Both films are combining violence and domesticated behavior in an attempt to be funny and fall somewhere between comedy and action. Mr. Right takes the comedy entirely too far and not only does it make graphic violence look like “play time” but it manages to insult women throughout the entire running time.
As a kid, Martha (Kendrick) just wanted to be a T-Rex. Her adult life hasn’t been the ferocious, picture perfect one she planned, as her long term boyfriend just revealed he has been cheating on her. Friends attempt to cheer her out of drunken misery, but it’s a stranger at a nearby convenience store that changes her world. Francis (Rockwell), asks Martha out, and she reluctantly says yes, leading to a nine-hour conversation through the streets of New Orleans. Martha assumes Francis is joking when he tells her about the sniper that’s trying to shoot at them, or the person he killed out back of the restaurant during their date. It’s only when she finally witnessed her hitman murder someone that she realizes what she has gotten herself into.
By far the worst Kendrick performance yet.
If Kendrick is trying to match the idiotic behavior of Amy Schumer, she should just return to her own unique personality. This is by far the worst Kendrick performance I have seen yet. It takes her character the entire length of the film to redeem herself, do something interesting and find her “inner T-Rex”. Worse than Kendrick’s performance is the script, which comes to us from screenwriter Max Landis. His work on other equally bad films, American Ultra and Victor Frankenstein might make you want to check the small print before seeing another movie. Almost worse than the plot devices he creates is the dialogue which is cringe worthy.
Martha is presented as a weak female character who is only happy when she is with a man. After days of depression, her mood is instantly changed with the new man enters her life. “I don’t remember what my life was like before I met you,” she says not even 30 minutes into the movie. At one point in the plot, to avoid sniper fire from a tree, they decide to go dancing, and bullets zip by as they twirl. “Are you upset because I killed that guy? Because it has nothing to do with the way I feel about you,” Francis says. Things go from really bad to worse as the film progresses. Even the rain sequence in the end looks terrible with cheap water effects. This is the type of film washed up, D-list actors take for money, not primetime A-listers with much more to offer.
Final Thought
There is nothing “right” about this movie. Kendrick secures the worst actor of the year spot.