Players Movie Review: The humour is fun, but the love, not well done 

We have got all these romantic comedies releasing week after week, and yet, the genre is hardly being explored. Every week, there’s a new fictional couple under the spotlight, who are unaware of how perfect they are for each other—or have a big fight that almost ruins it all before they discover that they are indeed perfect for each other in the end. Netflix’s new film, Players, isn’t too different. The characters, their interests and occupations are all interestingly uncommon, but the central play of the film is news to nobody.

Director: Trish Sie
Cast: Gina Rodriguez, Tom Ellis, Damon Wayans Jr, Joel Courtney, Augustus Prew, Liza Koshy

Mack (Gina Rodriguez) and her pack of guy friends play ‘wing-people’ for each other, as they come up with one-night stands and hook-up schemes. However, Mack meets Nick (Tom Ellis), and the meeting makes her want to go beyond casual dating. How she and her friends ‘play’ to convince Nick that she’s the right one for her is the rest of the film.

Players starts by creating quite the curiosity about how these bunch of early 30-year-olds make their way in and out of casual flings. Their friendship is atypical in the sense that they are colleagues too, which means that they spend pretty much every day together. The cherry on the top? They are all journalists as well, covering different beats. Mack is a sportswriter, Adam (Damon Wayans Jr.) handles visuals, while Brannagan (Augustus Prew) does obituaries. Nick is a war correspondent, but the best fit in this group is Little/Ryan (Joel Courtney), Brannagan’s brother who just hangs around with them. This mismatched cluster of companions is probably the most creatively written aspect of the film, as their dynamics add a lot of value to the screenplay.

While all of this initial momentum is great, the film eventually settles into the halls of familiarity. We have seen this game before, where the girl has a boy who loves her but is too blind to see how good he is for her. So, instead, she goes chasing before suddenly realising that it was always the first boy all along.

With the romance lacking in originality, Players’ writing strengths are attached only to the comedic parts. I wish there were a lot more of it though. Be it the absurd relationship of the brothers, Brannagan and Little, or a scene in which the underused Liza Koshy freaks out crazy to crack us up, it feels like the writer’s room of this film spent most of its time on this department.

There are many references to sports, especially baseball and the Yankees. For non-sport-loving audiences, the names of baseball players and their so-called iconic history citations are bound to go over their heads. With the film going overboard with these mentions, some effective comedy, and an unoriginal love story, Players lives up to the last part of a quote from the film itself… “Sometimes, you win. Sometimes, you lose.”