July | 2022 | A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

The new movie “The Forgiven” once again answers the questions as to why it is so hard to write a screenplay. One reason is that the story has to make sense, hold the viewers attention and the actions of the main characters have to, for the most part, be consistent with what a person would really do within a crucial situation.

In this story a couple, Jo and David Henninger are vacationing in Morocco near the Sahara Desert. David is an alcoholic and their marriage is not going well. They get into a accident and hit a young boy at night. What follows are a series of mostly boring scenes that seem to do nothing more than fill in the two hours. The main part of the story involves local Arabic ritual with the boy’s father that no American or any foreigner would ever do. This is a big reason why this story fails in a big way because in order for a story to work, we all have to relate to and ultimately believe what the characters are doing.

This movie stars Ralph Fiennes as David and Jessica Chastain as Jo and I wondered why these two major actors agreed to make this below average movie considering the script is bad and they would have to be shooting on location for months, in the middle of nowhere – not to mention the extreme heat and bad conditions.

The ratings for this film are a low 60% range on both IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes and I agree with these ratings and do not recommend this movie.

Kevin Hart is one of the best standup comedians to come around in decades. His rhythm, story telling and comedic timing is always about the best there is. Years ago Hart would release his standup acts as a movie and as far as comedy, these films are his best. Unfortunately as far as Hart releasing a comedy movie that even comes close matching to his talent as a standup comedian, this has not happened yet. Part of this is creating a great comedy screenplay is very rare and the other part is, perhaps Hart is better off just doing standup movies when it comes to comedy.

Hart has made several very good serious movies over the years including “The Upside” with Brian Cranston and most recently “Fatherhood” released on Netflix. A better career path would be to continue with the serious roles, considering how bad the new movie “The Man from Toronto” is.

The story of The Man from Toronto is that Hart is mistaken for a hit man played by Woody Harrelson. Being mistaken from a criminal or killer has been done several times in Hart’s past movies, including the two “Ride along” movies made with Ice Cube. We have all seen this idea too many times, with Hart trying to act like he is a killer that has never been funny. How this mistaken identity happens has to do with printer toner that gives Hart’s character the wrong address to a cabin at a resort, where he is mistaken for Harrelson. Considering that Hart is a short black man and Harrelson is a normal height white man, this mistaken identity given their considerable physical differences makes the entire idea more implausible just due to word of mouth with the other criminals involved. The remaining movie are several well done fight scenes, explosions, chase scenes and a retread of what we have all seen too many times before.

There is the standard movie-vomit-scene where Hart’s character vomits all over two people with the ongoing mysterious belief from too many directors where this is seen as something funny to throw into bad movie. In no movie is someone vomiting on someone else going to make it better. As a matter of fact too much vomiting is a tell-tale sign that this is yet another very bad film.

Other famous actors in this movie include Ellen Barkin and Kaley Cuoco and given their small parts and this bad script its a wonder why they both agreed to make this film.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for this Netflix movie are a very low 25% and unfortunately I do agree with this assessment and do not recommend this movie.