Review of The Man

The Man (2005)
3/10
All the production values of a Saturday afternoon action serial.
14 September 2005
I can't say the movie was a disappointment because I got what I expected from the trailer. I hoped for Jackson to reprise the Jules character from Pulp Fiction but I knew I wouldn't get him. Instead we get someone almost as angry and a whole lot more impotent: he threw tantrums when it's obvious that his bad-ass character would beat Levy. The chemistry between Jackson and Levy never develops, it's a tired combination of the oblivious and irritating (Levy) teamed up with the dead-serious bad-ass (Jackson). The director doesn't know how to take advantage of the two as his gags are poorly set-up. There's an awful lot of lowest-common-denominator stuff in this movie. Once the movie starts to drone on, out comes the fart jokes. In the end, I amused myself by substituting my own dialogue throughout the movie and looking for references to Toronto. That's another disappointment: the movie is set in Detroit and filmed in Toronto but there was minimal effort to actually make the city FEEL like Detroit. Sure, they digitally removed the CN Tower from the city skyline but the unique Toronto streetcars and streetcar tracks, Petro-Canada gas-stations, Royal York Hotel, bilingual signposts, people walking about and NO garbage or graffiti anywhere prove that it is NOT Detroit. They should have at least avoided the skyline completely since it doesn't match Detroit at all, even with the Skydome and CN Tower removed. There you go: a poor to mediocre effort on all levels.
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