Released: 12th January
Seen: 25th January
A simple concept done well will almost always be a recipe for a great time in a film, at least in terms of a film that can be easily enjoyed by the masses and provides a solid hour and a half of entertainment. You don’t need major stars or fancy locations or anything like that, just a simple idea that can provide a good thrill ride for a few hours. If done well you can make something magical, but if done wrong then it feels like you failed at doing something so incredibly basic that the only rational response is to point and laugh at the failure… but in the case of Role Play, that would imply that there was something funny going on and that just doesn’t seem to happen here.
Role Play introduces us to the Bracketts, Emma (Kaley Cuoco) and Dave (David Oyelowo) who are having a slight strain in their relationship so they decide to spice things up by engaging in a little role play. The idea is that they will go to a bar somewhere in New York, pretend to be strangers, and then go to a hotel, a very basic idea for a very basic couple. Well, surprise, turns out that Emma is actually an international assassin who has a bounty on her head and her covers accidentally been blown so she has to try and stop the criminal organisation she’s a part of from forcing her back into the business (or something, it’s not quite clear) and deal with her husband finding out about her secret life.
As you can tell, Role Play is basically a spin on the Mr and Mrs Smith story except less interesting because only one person is an assassin. Still as a concept, “Honey I lied about killing a bunch of people” could be a fun idea that leads to a little bit of over-the-top fun. Hell, Ghosted from last year basically did a similar idea except the couple involved wasn’t married in that movie… it’s not a great sign that the film that’s closest to this plot is one that I put on last year’s worst list for being so awful. Role Play fortunately isn’t quite as bad as Ghosted but only because it’s nowhere near as ambitious.
For a film that markets itself as an Action/Comedy it’s kind of staggering how Role Play fails at both of those things at the same time. The comedy is absolutely nonexistent, which is weird when you have a lead actress like Kaley Cuoco who has made a career out of being a great comedic actress… or at least it would be weird if the problem was her but it’s not, they just didn’t put any jokes in the script. There’s nothing funny going on, no subversions, no twists, nothing that is even remotely funny about what’s going on. This might be tolerable if the action portions were suitably cool enough to make up for it but alas, no such luck there either. The action scenes are basic at best, nothing shown in this film is more elaborate than something you might see in the most bargain basic cable cop show, a few iffy gun fights and that’s about it.
If you’re not laughing and you’re not cheering at cool set pieces then what do you spend most of Role Play doing? Being bored and annoyed by the unlikable main characters. There’s no real reason to root for them, they’re not fun or interesting or even that charming to help you want to gravitate towards them. You’re expected to care because they just happen to be the leads and that’s what you’re expected to do with lead characters, but these aren’t really characters. These are figures that move throughout the movie doing just enough to be considered conscious and that’s about it.
Role Play isn’t a film that requires nor deserves a deep examination of where it went wrong or what it does right… it’s just not funny, and not in a “Oh I don’t find this joke funny” way but in a “There are no actual jokes to be found anywhere in the script” kind of way. When you sell yourself as a comedy but forget to put the jokes in, you fail. It’s a simple basic idea, one almost every sitcom on earth has tried some variation of at least once and that every person on earth could see the funny side in, but even with the most basic idea possibly they flubbed it. Not even worth watching for the scenery since most of it is just shitty hotel rooms and the occasional empty mansion… it’s just dull, there’s nothing more to say.
Movie Meister Reviews 