You’re tasked with making an awkward buddy film action comedy. You need to hit all the notes: two horribly mismatched people jammed together by fate, characters whose flaws are healed by this unlikely alliance, eventual bonding and a romantic subplot.

You take this paint-by-numbers template and give it to a 17 year old student writer who has no idea how human interaction works and tell him to produce a script.

That’s The Man From Toronto.

I could stop right there. I should. But I have a contractual obligation to produce content here at The Loftus Party.

The Man From Toronto is the movie you see when you want something mildly entertaining to play in the background while you scroll through TikToks or work a Sudoku puzzle. In comedies like this, you need a funny, mouthy comic to play the Everyman part. In this Kevin Hart shines. The only out loud chuckles I had were in the interplay between Hart and Woody Harrelson who is sort-of reprising his role from Zombieland.

The rest of the film is predictable sight gags starting with the opening sequence. Mrs. Cranky called all three punchlines the second they set it up. There’s villains who monologue so that the good guys can escape, the highly emotional race to the train station to win the girl back and many other plot devices found in the Screenwriting for Dummies book.

Our 17 year old script writer, tasked with bringing the cold assassin and underachiever together, doesn’t do a convincing job explaining how this pair eventually grow to be friends. Heck, he doesn’t explain why Harrelson doesn’t slit Hart’s throat within two minutes of their first meeting.

So, grab your half-completed Green Belt Sudoku book and enjoy!

ps Action star, Jason Stratham was slated to be in it but left 6 weeks before filming over “creative disagreement“. Perhaps he knew something.