‘Playdate’ Review – Prime Video’s Abominable Action-Comedy Is An Insult

Having spent over a decade as an entertainment critic, one of the things I have realised is that I have deeply unsophisticated taste. Ordinarily, a movie like Prime Video’s Playdate would be right up my street, a dumb-fun throwback to the halcyon days of buddy action-comedies, despite the itch having been scratched only recently by Heads of State on the same platform. I hope you can appreciate, then, quite how bad this movie is, that even I, someone whose favourite films unironically include The Rock and Con Air, think Luke Greenfield’s Kevin James vehicle is woefully unfunny, misguided garbage.

And it could have been fine! Granted, aspiring to “fine” is probably a sobering reminder of what we generally expect from made-for-streaming movies, but based on how it turned out, “fine” would have constituted a mythical artistic pinnacle Playdate can only dream of. But I do kind of like the idea of Kevin James and post-Reacher Alan Ritchson doing an odd-couple routine. The early portion of this movie is so silly in such a broad and obvious way that I was sure it was making fun of the exact movie it ultimately reveals itself to be.

James plays Brian Jennings, a deeply unimpressive forensic auditor who, after losing his job, is faced with the possible indignity of becoming a stay-at-home dad and having to bond with the son of his wife, Emily (Sarah Chalke). Lucas (Benjamin Pajak) is a relentlessly bullied dance enthusiast who can’t play sports, so Brian can’t relate to him at all, since he fancies himself as a kind of no-nonsense win-at-all-costs part-time coach and full-time tough guy, but he’s really just a floundering out-of-shape middle-aged man with no emotional maturity.

This is why Brian crucially doesn’t relate to Jeff Eamon (Ritchson), an ex-Delta Force Übermensch who Brian meets in the park while he’s playing ball with his semi-feral son, CJ (Banks Pierce). Jeff’s the living embodiment of all the masculine cliches Brian tries to embody, but he’s also a dopey himbo with childlike enthusiasm who immediately considers Brian – or Bri Bri, as he continuously calls him – his best friend. A playdate begins pretty much against Brian’s will, and then that playdate morphs into something else entirely, since Jeff has been a little flexible about the truth of his relationship with CJ, and they’re both being pursued by dangerous forces.

I liked Playdate through this stretch, more or less. I thought Ritchson was pretty funny in this exaggerated mode that makes novel use of his physicality, and while James clearly isn’t interested in the movie he’s in, part of me thought that was the point. Even by the first proper action set-piece, which is powered by the joke of Jeff accidentally brutalising a bunch of very young mascot characters in a themed family restaurant, I was more or less on board. But this joke of Ritchson slapping children around is the only one that the movie has. Almost all of the action sequences are built around it. And at no point does Kevin James ever get let in on the joke, looking bewildered in the background as he interprets playing the straight man as not really playing anything at all.

From there, Playdate wrong-footed me consistently, all for the wrong reasons. Isla Fisher is in this as a bitchy playground soccer mom who makes fun of Brian’s windbreaker, and I was convinced that she was going to factor back into the plot later to have some fun with Jeff, but she only reappears in a fake-feeling car chase that plays out like an advert for the fleet of Honda Odysseys being driven in convoy. Between this, Tyler Perry’s Finding Joy, and the execrable Ice Cube-starring War of the Worlds, Amazon is not escaping the accusations of using movies solely as an excuse for egregious product placement.

There’s a compelling argument to be made that this is all Playdate is good for, either way. The plot becomes increasingly ridiculous as it goes, but not in the manner of a parody. Even at its most exaggerated, it’s still trying to find some kind of pathos that it doesn’t earn at all, pretending to have something to say about fatherhood just because Stephen Root shows up at one point as Jeff’s dad, solely to brag about having abandoned him when he was a kid. There are multiple tasteless feints in the direction of real trauma – Jeff’s backstory involves him being court-martialled for having a working conscience – and then undercuts it with silly gags about torture, like in one scene when Jeff tries to “waterboard” Paul Walter Hauser with a jug of ice. The script has no idea what it’s trying to say about anything, to the extent that I suspect it was assembled from components of different stories that may at one point have had a coherent beginning, middle, and end. The way Alan Tudyk is wedged in as a last-minute villain suggests this is not the movie that anyone originally set out to make.

You can see this in other technical details too, including lines that were clearly dubbed over in post-production. I mentioned War of the Worlds earlier, and while Playdate is, to be fair, better than that, it speaks to the same lack of care that Amazon seems to be approaching all of its original movies with these days. Whatever the production pipeline looks like, it’s evidently unbothered about canned reactions being reused, errant coughs lingering in the audio, and other blatant patch jobs intended to get a movie out of the door in any state possible. It’s art-as-content in its most egregious and obvious form, and is utterly undeserving of even the 90 minutes it takes to suffer through.