The Players Review: Netflix’s Valentine Romcom is a genre upgrade
The Players Review: Since Netflix announced the return of the moribund studio romantic comedy with its “Summer of Love” in 2018, the company has been building a stable of formulaic films at home . The genre wasn’t rebooted so much as adapted for a new streaming home now with a specific style: basic watchable, shiny and disposable. The few that have stuck around (To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Set It Up) have stuck around largely due to the charisma of their stars, without which there’s little hope for a romantic comedy. This was also the case with 2019’s Someone Great, a mediocre film made memorable by Gina Rodriguez’s endearing charm.
The former Jane the Virgin star has a natural appeal for a romantic lead, the megawatt smile, the puppy dog eyes, the caffeinated energy, a sunny, ethereal presence that hits that precious sweet spot between beautiful and relatable. It’s certainly the highlight of The Players Review, a new Netflix rom-com released on Valentine’s Day in which Rodriguez plays Mac, a Brooklyn-based sports journalist looking for her own romantic cheating manual.
Like Amazon’s simultaneous release, Upgraded, starring Camila Mendes, The Players is directed by Trish See (Pitch Perfect 3) from a script by Whit Anderson, and the magnetism of a veteran small-screen star eclipses the most incoherent or downright ridiculous elements of the film. affair. In this case, Mac and her team come up with several schemes to get a one-night stand: fellow journalist and enthusiastic straight man Adam (Damon Wayans Jr.), Katie, Carnal Brannagan (Augustus Prew), and Mac’s somewhat hapless brother. Brannagan. Little (Joel Courtney from The Kissing Booth Netflix movies). They’re athletes (Mac in particular is a die-hard Yankees fan) for whom sex and romance are all strategy and reward, X’s and O’s on a chalkboard. The Players is sometimes very comical in its abstraction: everything is a game, sex scores, nothing to keep track of. (At least show some sex on screen, even if it’s the loud, horny kind.)
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That is, until Mac sleeps with Nick Marshall (Lucifer’s Tom Ellis), an award-winning war journalist whose accolades, experience and money spark jealousy, a feeling sometimes indistinguishable from lust or love. Suddenly, the tiebreaker arrives: turning a one-night stand into a romance because, as Mac says, “I’m 33, I’m tired, and I want an adult.” Or as Brannagan describes the task in one of the movie’s many funny bits about modern dating, “undoing the simple brain of the penis.”
The lengths to which winning parties often go to achieve this, including harassment and folders full of personal data, are strange (and sometimes funny), but the stakes feel real. Although Mac is a caricature of a boy’s girl, the kind who drinks tall boy sapporos, eats greasy carton sugar and watches wrestling, who goes to the bar every night to look sexy and toned but never works out, Rodriguez continues yearning for her – for love, for professional success, for change and direction – superficially. Anderson’s script is smart enough to present Nick as neither a villain nor an innocent bystander: he is a grown man and more complex than his portrayals suggest. But who hasn’t thought of someone as love?
The Players Review: Players are also self-aware enough to make fun of their own flaws, such as Mac not having girlfriends, which leads to receptionist Ashley (YouTuber Liza Koshy) and Adam’s new girlfriend Claire (Ego Nwodim of SNL), be the hosts. the group. (To be fair, as Mack says, it’s hard to make friends as an adult.) C’s direction, while occasionally reaching for too much flair, is solid and unusually grounded for this subtle genre. The Brooklyn of the movie, the bowling alleys, the pool bars and the promenade near the bridge reflect the real city.
In the history of romantic comedies removed from any real sense of journalism, Players has more substance than most: there’s a real determination to Mac’s career as a local sportswriter, though it’s hard to believe. newspaper with local. Sports section in the year 2024.