The Man From Toronto is a direct-to-Netflix action buddy comedy starring Kevin Hart and Woody Harrelson. Average guy Hart is mistaken for Harrelson’s professional information extractor (torturer) and has to go undercover as him. Buddy comedy hijinks ensue.

There are so many obvious problems with this flick.

Kevin Hart often plays an annoying character but he overdid it here. His hyperkinetic complaining guy routine needed a punch in the face.

Woody Harrelson feels miscast as a quiet badass… not that he can’t do it, but it feels like this flick really wanted to cast The Rock in another Hart/Rock combo. Apparently the character was originally going to be Jason Statham which makes more sense too.

The limited visual FX are an embarrassment to you, me, the studio, and Netflix as a whole. How do you give such a low budget to a Kevin Hart/Woody Harrelson film?

There’s a ton of very obvious ADR inserted to add extra jokes and exposition. Not a crime, but it was quite noticeable.

It desperately wanted to be funny, it desperately wanted to climb to the limited heights of Central Intelligence, and just failed constantly. And yet the humor was somehow the best part of the film and that ain’t sayin’ much.

As a buddy action comedy, I didn’t find the repartee between the two guys very quippy or funny. More desperate and reaching.

The action scenes – which don’t have to be great in a comedy – were really poorly filmed (except for one near the end). Plus illogical… they are in a cargo plane and the pilot is shot and they start to nose dive. The people in the cargo hold are thrown to the back of the plane… as if the plane was going up, not down.

Physics. Pshaw!

Anyhow, this isn’t the worst flick I’ve ever seen but it tries real hard to be. I think there’s enough charisma in the two leads to salvage it even if a lot of the stuff they are doing is unfunny and uninteresting. Maybe I’m damning with faint praise… this isn’t good but I’ve seen worse.

Score: 68