The Man from Toronto (2022)

The Man from Toronto arrives as a 2022 Netflix action comedy, directed by Patrick Hughes, in which a bumbling fitness entrepreneur named Teddy Jackson is mistaken for a legendary assassin and pressed into service by the FBI to help capture a would-be Venezuelan dictator. Kevin Hart performs his customary agitation. Woody Harrelson, stepping in after Jason Statham departed over tonal disagreements, performs his customary menace with a side of weary charm. A 1969 Dodge Charger named Debora is destroyed by a train. Critics were unmoved, and the aggregate scores reflect a collective shrug of some magnitude.

For those of us who catalogue the social consciousness of the modern studio comedy, the inventory here is thin. The film does cast a Black lead and surrounds him with Latino and Black supporting players, which registers as a modest, genre-standard gesture toward representation, no more and no less. The female characters, including Ellen Barkin's assassin and Kaley Cuoco's sister-in-law, occupy their slots without any interrogation of gender dynamics. There is no LGBTQ+ presence, no racial reckoning, no climate anxiety, no critique of the wealth that funds the assassination economy, no body image discourse, no neurodivergent depiction, and no revisionist reading of history. The villains are Venezuelan and the heroes are American, which is geopolitics of the laziest kind, but it is not history being rewritten.

What remains is a film that lectures no one about anything. It asks only that we watch Kevin Hart vomit on a hostage and accept that a Dodge Charger can defeat a Japanese assassin. The cultural awareness on display is essentially nil, and the movie seems at peace with that. So are we. There are worse sins than being toothless, though the Rotten Tomatoes consensus suggests the critics would like a word about the other ones.