Rather like the studio horror movie, the bar for the action comedy has lowered so dramatically that the mere act of not tripping over it headfirst is now considered enough. Modeled after an old-fashioned, something-for-him and something-for-her date-night formula, they tend to involve attractive stars smugly quipping at each other while sleekly avoiding pop-soundtracked gunfire, all theoretically allowing for the opportunity to show off dual personas, class clown and jock rolled into one.
But the magic that was on display in 2005’s magnetic Mr & Mrs Smith, a film that has arguably had the most visible, and damaging, impact on the genre in the almost two decades since (itself heavily in debt to 1994’s True Lies), has been almost entirely absent in its many imitators. Last year’s hauntingly awful Chris Evans-Ana de Armas starrer Ghosted acted as an almost instructive what-not-to-do, a punishing, unintentional parody of what these films have become in a year in which there seemed to be more of them than ever before. To kick off the new year with yet another – male-female pairing: check; one of them is a spy/assassin: check – is not the most thrilling prospect but with many, many more to come in the next 12 months (Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz in Back in Action, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt in The Fall Guy, Donald Glover’s Mr & Mrs Smith TV series), it’s about finding the silver lining where possible.
For Amazon’s Role Play, it’s more like bronze, the great victory being that it’s really not as atrocious as these films too often are, bar lazily stumbled over. A lot of that’s down to what these films are usually saved by – star power – and while the stars in question here might be slightly lower-wattage, in industry terms at least, there’s enough energy on display to almost power the whole thing, a sprint when a sleepwalk is usually deemed enough. It’s becoming a familiar mode for Kaley Cuoco, a long-time sitcom star who received an unlikely career boost from the breakout hit The Flight Attendant and has been chasing that high ever since. That show’s initially invigorating yet ultimately exhausting mix of comedy and thriller was also seen in her next film – the Kevin Hart vehicle The Man from Toronto – and her next show – last year’s Based on a True Story.
She’s trying again here, playing a suburban mum who also happens to be a globe-trotting assassin, keeping that quiet from her husband, played by David Oyelowo. But the all-consuming nature of her job is starting to eat away at their relationship and after she forgets their anniversary, the pair decide to spice things up a bit, engaging in a bit of role play at a hotel in the city. They’ll meet in the lobby, pretend to be strangers and take things back to a room. But when a nosey stranger, played by Bill Nighy, intervenes, things go awry.
What follows is exactly what one would expect – a shootout, a chase, a shadowy organisation – but never enough of what one wouldn’t, a familiar mish-mash in need of a persuaive reason to exist. It’s a mostly adequate version of that movie – it’s never as unfunny or as maddeningly incoherent as these things can be – but it’s crucially lacking in such a way that I often forgot I was watching something self-contained, and that perhaps it were a pilot for a show, maybe by the end of the season I’ll see why we’re here again.
Modulating the silly and the serious in a way that she often struggled with in Based on a True Story, Cuoco’s performance does manage an awful lot of heavy lifting here, and she has some real chemistry with an all-in Oyelowo, the pair briefly showing us what they could do together with a script that was able to challenge them. But here there’s never enough detail or perversity or gristle to catapult them from two-line types in a treatment to actual characters in a movie let alone something approximating real people. Thanks to the sorry state of the action comedy genre as is, Role Play isn’t a total loss but it’s still much too far from a win.
