An excerpt from my script review for Mr. Right which will be available 04/11/16.
(And don’t forget to check out Goals One and Two!):
3.) Quality of Characters
An appreciation is beginning to grow for Mr. Landis’s character creation.
Annoying as all shit, sure, Martha still feels like a real person. Not just some sad “woe is me” unlucky lover, she’s out to kicks ass and take names.
Same with Mr. Right. He could have been just a basic hitman, but no. Backstory delivered on what he was, and what he is now. (Sort of like Batman, except he kills people.) On top of that, he’s a very socially awkward individual.
It’s these minor touches that really help when crafting characters, and although I didn’t initially empathize with Martha (mainly due to dialogue issues), she did come to grow on me.
What didn’t work were all the mobster names Landis uses for his “bad guys”. They felt like…
https://youtu.be/UcNz5NuRycg?t=82
Too many minor characters had names, and they all blended together, especially when Charlie is the uncle to two of them, but all the other characters are calling him “Charlie” not “Uncle Charlie”.
Eventually I figured out that it was Von and Richard who were his nephews, but took me out of the story due to frustration.
Lastly, still some detail focused character descriptions. Are these in here to help differentiate between them, or does Max Landis really need these characters to look a specific way?
One that really stood out was:
Mr. RIGHT, 30, handsome with wavy, messy brown hair, walks up
the street. He has a lighter-than-air, poppy, bubbly air
about him, as though he just walked out of a musical comedy.
He is constantly looking around, smiling blissfully and
blankly at everything.
Did Mr. Landis just try to write himself as a super assassin?
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