Mr. Right

Sam Rockwell is a strange hit man, and Anna Kendrick is the girl he falls in love with. But it’s a little more complicated than that …

I went back and forth on this one. After the first thirty minutes I was ready to eject it, the meet cute dialogue getting a little thick for me. But then it is revealed that the reason he is so awesomely good at what he does is that he has some sort of power that makes him very, very, very fast, and a sense that is almost like precognition. And he sees this power in her, too. He proves it to her by throwing knives at her, and she is astonished to learn she is able to easily catch them, inches from her body. Then she realizes this crazy fellow has been telling the truth when he says he has just killed someone, and is conflicted as to whether she still wants to keep seeing him. There is a strong attraction, but there is the matter of all the bad guys in New Orleans trying to kill them, and his old employer, Tim Roth, trying to retire him. See, he has decided that killing is wrong, so whenever someone hires him to kill someone, he kills the client instead. This is bad for business.

So it got promising, and then mostly pissed it away in a pretty standard massive shoot-out at the end. His precognitive skills seem to turn off and on as the script requires, without any logic. And it takes her a long, long time to realize she can be just as bad-ass as he is. I kept wanting to like it, and I did, a little, but my final verdict is a thumbs down. I always do enjoy Anna Kendrick, though, and Rockwell isn’t bad, either. I just wish they had done one more draft of the script.