Released: 12th November
Seen: 30th November
Sometimes a film just rubs you the wrong way and it’s really hard to explain why. Sometimes there is just something about the tone and performances in any given film that, for some reason, triggers something deep in the hate-filled portion of your brain that makes you want to scream in anger and yet it’s hard to fully pinpoint what it is about that film that gets you going. This is a problem for someone reviewing a film that has this kind of issue happen because the entire point of a review is to pinpoint what exactly it is about a film that does or doesn’t work and explain that in a way that can be understood… but here we are, Playdate just seemed to rub me the wrong way and now I’m going to spend the better part of a few paragraphs trying to put my finger on what its problem is because “It sucks” is just not good enough an explanation, even though it does absolutely suck.
Playdate has new stepfather, Brian (Kevin James), trying his best to connect with his new stepson, Lucas (Benjamin Pajak). Brian tries to connect via sports, Lucas is obviously more of an artistic kid, but instead of being a good parent and actually listening to what his kid is into he keeps trying to use sports to connect to the kid. This leads him to a park where, after a random confrontation with some moms, Brian runs into Jeff (Alan Ritchson) and his son CJ (Banks Pierce) and they hit it off well enough to all start hanging out but soon a bunch of goons appear and start chasing them down. Turns out the goons are after CJ who is not actually Jeff’s kid, but Jeff is still trying to save CJ from whatever bad guys are trying to hunt him down which leads to a lot of badly paced action scenes and a convoluted story about found families that somehow involves people who are genetically linked… did I mention this movie sucks?
OK let’s be kind and admit that not EVERYTHING about Playdate sucks, it does have the occasional bright spot. Alan Ritchson, despite being given a one-joke character, manages to be charming and lovable enough that you can see how you might want to root for this guy. He understands that a guy with his proportions doing certain things is just inherently funny and has enough talent to make those work. I also can’t pretend that there’s not at least one fight scene that’s kind of fun, mostly because one human being of Alan Ritchson’s size throwing about a bunch of small children and slamming them into metal walls without any real care is the kind of stupid fun that it’s hard not to enjoy… and that’s about it, one actor and one action scene was enjoyable enough, but not worth everything else.
Part of what makes Playdate just such a slog is that every character that isn’t played by Alan Ritchson is either an unlikable cliche (The mom mafia or the people working at the restaurant just as a few examples) or are so bland that you could be forgiven for forgetting they were in Playdate… like Brian, who is another in the long line of dull Kevin James characters whose entire thing is pretending to be the most macho dude around. With no real characters to latch onto it’s hard to really care about any of them. You can’t really care about Brian, certainly can’t care about the kids (The actors do a fine job, they just have nothing to work with), the villains aren’t interesting enough to be fun, which is wild since one of them is clearly an Elon Musk analog… there’s no one here who you would want to spend an hour with, so 90 minutes with them is just a pain.
Then there’s just the bad stylistic choices, the attempt to make everything cool and epic with freeze frames in the middle of generic-looking fights and dull shot choices that feel like they just put the camera down and captured whatever the hell they could without really caring. Things that could have been interesting are diluted through bad choices. There’s a fight scene in a themed restaurant where Jeff goes off to do cool spy shit while Brian gets angry with a costumed character and you can see them trying to do a match cut fight where both guys are going back and forth in their respective fights, only Jeff’s is meant to be more serious and Brian’s fighting a giant fucking weasel… except they don’t make it work, the fights aren’t in any way interesting and the geography of the venue makes no sense. It’s so badly handled that I only understand why the costumed character was giving Brian so much shit because there are bloopers at the end of the film, and the character’s head falls off, making the relationship clear. If I need to wait for bloopers to understand your fight scene, you fucked up.
Then there’s just the fact that there is no cohesion. Some of the action scenes feel like they’re out of your standard action film, Kevin is giving a performance that wouldn’t feel out of place in any of his standard Sandler pictures, some of the effects are out of a family-friendly spy kids movie and Alan Rtichson is basically a walking cartoon character. None of these tones blend in any way and create a viewing experience that’s just kind of exhausting to sit through. Some scenes are meant to be the silliest thing possible, which butts right against a serious moment involving a child suicide bomber and there is no way those two things work in the same film. By the time the film has dropped the song Rhythm Of The Night to underscore a chase scene, it’s hard not to just be completely done with everything that’s being put on screen because it was almost offensive in how stupid it all was.
Maybe that’s why Playdate rubbed me the wrong way; it doesn’t respect its audience. Dumb films are all well and good. I’ve praised several gloriously stupid films in the past, but none of those felt like they didn’t give a shit about the audience, but something about this film gives off that vibe. It doesn’t really care about a cohesive tone, about interesting characters or even a sense of internal logic that might be enjoyable. It just kind of throws shit out and hopes it works but it doesn’t, it just doesn’t work.
Playdate is far from the worst thing I’ve ever seen, but it’s not good. It starts being annoying right from the start, and it never manages to fix itself. It’s not like it has the most original idea, but it doesn’t even do a good job at just being a generic spin on “Actually, my dad is a secret spy”, it’s just not a fun film to sit through. I’m sure it was fun to make, the blooper reel made it look like everyone involved had a blast on set, but if only some of that joy made it through to the actual movie… it would’ve been nice if they’d tried.
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