Please Kill Mr. Know It All

Please Kill Mr. Know It All

Please Kill Mr. Know It All is a romantic comedy about a writer named Sally (Lara Jean Chorostecki).  After hearing the horror short story The Monkey’s Paw as kid, Sally has come to the cynical conclusion that all wishes lead to bad things, especially after she experiences some unfortunate coincidences.  Despite her cynical outlook on life, Sally has found some success writing an advice column under the pseudonym “Mr. Know It All.” When the column unexpectedly hits it big after a testimonial on a talk show (featuring a cameo by Colin Mochrie as the show’s host), Sally is shocked to discover that people think that Mr. Know It All is actually a man.  As such, she creates a sketch of a random man she sees in a movie theatre to be the “face” of Mr. Know it All.  However, as it turns out, the man is a hitman named Albert (Jefferson Brown) and he is not too happy that people in the street now recognize his face, which makes the job of killing people for money somewhat difficult.  As such, Albert sets off to find and kill Mr. Know It All and, as you can probably guess, the two eventually meet and romance ensues. I am going to try my very hardest not to let my predisposed hatred of romantic comedies affect my thoughts on the film too much.  To put it simply, this film just wasn’t for me.  There is just something about the romantic comedy genre, which just gets under my skin.  The plot of the film has a very unrealistic sitcom-like feel to it, which is probably alright for some people, however I thought it just came off as goofy.  Nearly every character in the film is a cliché, with the worse offender being Sally’s friend Patti (Kristina Pesic), who was very hard for me to watch at times.  Also, Sally’s awkward behaviour looked like it was supposed to be played for laughs, but it came off as a bit lame to me. Moving onto some positives about the film, I did like the black and white re-enactment of The Monkey Paw, which is shown at the start of the film.   I also thought that my enjoyment of the film improved slightly in the third act when the focus was a bit more on the hitman angle, than the romantic one.  Speaking of which, the fact that Albert is trying to kill Sally leads to some very awkward situations when he starts to fall for her, which is definitely something that can only happen in the movies. In conclusion, for what it is, Please Kill Mr. Know It All is a somewhat effective romantic comedy.  However, that does not mean I necessarily have to like the film.6 | WATCHABLE