Mr. Right (2016)

Mr. Right arrives from 2015 with the weary confidence of a genre that had already exhausted itself. A hitman who kills the people who hire him falls for a chipper young woman with a gift for catching knives. Sam Rockwell and Anna Kendrick do the work their chemistry demands, and the filmmakers mistake that chemistry for a finished screenplay. The result is a tonal jumble, as the reviewers of the day observed, though that phrase undersells how thoroughly the movie dissolves into bloodshed whenever the romance runs out of things to say.

When we inspect the film for contemporary social consciousness, the cupboards are bare. The cast is led by white performers, with RZA and Jaiden Kaine appearing in support, but the movie makes no argument about representation and does not appear to want to. There are no LGBTQ characters, no engagement with race as a theme, no environmental anxieties, no meditation on wealth or labor. The criminal economy on display is simply weather. Kendrick's Martha does acquire agency, dodging attacks and dispatching a villain with a statue, and this is a modest departure from the standard romantic comedy posture. Any feminist reading must be imported from outside. The film offers no such commentary and seems faintly baffled by the idea.

There is no sermon here, which deserves acknowledgment in an era that rarely rewards restraint. Mr. Right is vulgar, silly, and indifferent to meaning beyond the next gunshot. We classify it accordingly: a relic of the post-Pulp Fiction hitman comedy, arriving a decade too late and possessing almost none of the ideological furniture we have been trained to inventory. Rotten Tomatoes says forty-four percent. That feels generous and, more to the point, beside the question entirely.