Review: Kevin Hart and Woody Harrelson make a funny duo in ‘The Man From Toronto’

The San Francisco Chronicle

By: Mick LaSalle 

June 23, 2022 Updated: June 24, 2022

Woody Harrelson (left) and Kevin Hart in “The Man From Toronto.”Photo: Sabrina Lantos / Netflix

“The Man From Toronto” is no better than it has to be, but it’s as good as it needs to be. It provides a succession of comic situations for Kevin Hart and Woody Harrelson and is reasonably funny throughout. If you start streaming it on Netflix, where it’s available starting Friday, June 24, you’ll find it gives you no reason to stop watching and only the slightest temptation to fast-forward.

The film is based on one of the oldest comic tropes since the beginning of theater: mistaken identity. Hart plays Teddy, a fast-talking entrepreneur whose get-rich schemes have all ended in failure. He goes on a romantic getaway with his wife (Jasmine Matthews), drops her off at a spa and looks to check in at the cabin he rented. But he ends up at the wrong address, where he is assumed to be the “man from Toronto” — a specialist renowned for using torture to elicit confessions.

One surefire farce situation is when two people are talking, with each thinking the conversation is about something else. When Teddy shows up at the wrong door, the henchmen watch him coming into the house with kitchen items (such as a cleaver) and bottles of Champagne, and they assume that these are part of his specialized torture ritual.

The real man from Toronto is played by Harrelson, faintly and intentionally ridiculous in his black clothes and black hat. Circumstances throw Teddy together with Toronto, in an unlikely alliance, and the movie becomes something of a buddy comedy, with the mercurial Hart and the measured Harrelson making a strong team.

What unites both actors is their subtlety. Hart’s mode is to be loud and fast, but he’s always thinking, so that his face registers flickers of thought and feeling that give texture to his acting. And Harrelson is a master at subtly undercutting the impassive postures that his characters adopt — he knows that his characters are never as tough as they think.

Harrelson has some delicately funny moments in a scene in which he meets a woman and likes her but doesn’t quite know how to act. He can’t flirt and can’t dance, but he stumbles through, as the woman (an equally funny Kaley Cuoco) takes the lead.

One of the continuing pleasures of the movie is that, for circumstances not worth going into, Teddy has to keep pretending to be the man from Toronto. Hart and the screenwriters score these scenes well, so that each time Teddy gets more and more absurdly confident in the role.

Kevin Hart and Ellen Barkin in “The Man From Toronto.”Photo: Sabrina Lantos / Netflix

The movie has one genuinely absorbing action sequence that takes place in a shopping mall, with Hart holding onto a huge centerpiece diorama while suspended over a 50-foot drop. It’s also good to see Matthews again; she was in “The Tomorrow War” (2021) and is perfectly charming as Teddy’s sweet-natured wife.

“The Man From Toronto” never falls down, but it starts to wobble in the last third, when all the semiserious elements that were set in motion have to be resolved. It resolves them, dutifully, but if there’s a point where the fast-forward finger might start to get itchy, that’s the place.

Still, as a 110-minute diversion, as a source of some laughs, as an opportunity for two funny guys to be funny — and to be funny with each other — what’s not to like? Just go in not expecting much.

“The Man From Toronto”: Action comedy.

Starring Kevin Hart and Woody Harrelson.

Directed by Patrick Hughes.

(PG-13. 110 minutes.)

On Netflix starting Friday, June 24.

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