Role Play premieres on Prime Video January 12.
It’s easy to see why Kaley Cuoco might want to play a part like Emma Brackett, the professionally duplicitous but essentially good-hearted heroine at the center of Role Play. Emma – not her real name – is both a wife and mother who claims to work in finance and a paid assassin trained by a shadowy organization. As she eventually explains to her husband, Dave (David Oyelowo), she doesn’t consider her life in suburban New Jersey a cover : Her love for her family is real, even if her attendance at boring conferences in various Midwestern American cities is not. The premise is essentially a high-concept metaphor for Cuoco’s own career, in which she’s been on TV in some form or another for practically the entire 21st century. Having played Penny on The Big Bang Theory for upwards of a decade, she’s surely aware of how it feels to live as someone else – albeit not someone this lethal.
Whether this makes Cuoco particularly good as Emma, however, is another matter. In fairness to its stranded actors, Role Play itself is a 95-minute identity crisis. It comes on like a True Lies-style action comedy where a couple is shaken out of mid-marriage doldrums by the revelation that one of them is a deadly super-spy. But it waffles constantly between faux-psychological danger, action-thriller momentum, and cutesy farce. Eventually its misbegotten genre becomes clear: It’s one of those streaming-service capers, like Ghosted or Red Notice, that feel like the result of filmmakers half-watching the 1963 Audrey Hepburn-Cary Grant team-up Charade at a bar with the sound off and deciding they got the gist of it.
The title comes from a brainstorm Emma and Dave have to bring some excitement back into their kid-laden, work-clogged lives: They’ll hire a sitter, check into a hotel under an assumed name, and role-play a first-time meeting at a bar. Dave’s choice of fake name gets one of the movie’s few laughs, but it’s back to well-trod Family Plan territory when a mysterious, insinuating stranger (Bill Nighy) from Emma’s secret life intervenes and the truth about her job comes out. How did this stranger find expert shapeshifter Emma? Well, she has appeared on a “dark net most-wanted” list, whatever that is.
It won’t be the last time an interesting question is answered with a just-go-with-it shrug. To mitigate some moral queasiness about Emma’s work, Role Play has her insisting that her contract killing jobs have been occasional, just the minimum needed to keep her family protected both financially and physically, without explaining why her job seems to run her ragged anyway. (As described and depicted, her murdering takes up roughly 72 hours per month.) Things aren’t any clearer on the homefront: The script repeatedly emphasizes that Emma and Dave first met eight years earlier, despite their oldest child not looking a day under 10, a minor detail that nonetheless underlines how these kids exist merely as a plot point to be potentially endangered.
Sometimes stars can overcome this kind of sloppiness with shared megawatt charisma. But the split between Cuoco and Oyelowo could charitably be described as unbalanced: She overacts wildly, making faces not suited for the intense close-ups she keeps being given, while he spends most of the runtime wearing a look of consternation. Maybe they’re supposed to be mismatched at first, but they never sync up. Cuoco leans on her sitcom training and pulls a Jennifer Aniston, going for laughs by repeating character’s names constantly and brusquely and generally contributing to contemporary screen comedy’s insistence on the side-splitting potential in every utterance of “Bob.” Oyelowo, meanwhile, seems barely aware that he’s in a comedy.
Role Play doesn’t know if it’s a comedy or a thriller, and not in an exciting, genre-bending way.
And maybe he’s not! Role Play often seems genuinely uncertain, and not in an exciting, genre-bending way. The unconvincing espionage material – a fight in a Berlin nightclub does not an Atomic Blonde make – has no real connection to the specifics of Emma and Dave’s marriage. The reasons why their relationship is wilting are never explored; it’s just taken for granted that it is, except for when the plot requires them to love and cherish each other. Nighy is the only one in the cast who strikes the correct tone for this preposterous material: Droll yet committed, oddly menacing yet still comic. In other words, he understands how to role-play. The rest of the movie is the bad kind of charade.
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