Role Play (2024)

By: Mike Ward on Friday, January 12

R Running Time: 100 mins

SHOULD I SEE IT?

YES

  • An easy to watch, action/comedy/mystery hybrid which finds Kaley Cuoco breaking out of her television successes to lead a theatrical movie.

  • Bill Nighy shines in an extended cameo and David Oyelowo shows some nice comedic chops along the way.

  • A harmless, well-intentioned weekend streaming film.

NO

  • Lacks excitement, suspense, or pretty much any of the traits it needs to be engaging.

  • Kaley Cuoco is a fine comedic actor. Here, she feels out of her depth and not convincing as an assassin leading a secret double life.

  • Lackluster script, paint-by-numbers directing, and punchless as an action movie, Role Play never delivers anything substantive with the story it attempts to tell.


OUR REVIEW

If not for the lack of chemistry, it’s the lack of believability that plagues Role Play, a new comedy/action hybrid starring Kaley Cuoco and David Oyelowo as a married couple who have reached a rut in their marriage. Eager to spice things up for their seventh wedding anniversary, they decide to “role play” on a date night, only to be interrupted by Bob Kellerman (Bill Nighy), a stranger who buys their drinks at a bar and keeps interrupting their secretive plans.

Nighy gives the movie a boost early on, but then disappears almost as quickly as he arrives. As we learn early on, Cuoco’s character, Emma, has also been role playing in her marriage. Husband Dave (Oyelowo) has no idea that she secretly works as a murder-for-hire assassin. The business trips she takes, at the direction of her boss Raj (Rudi Dharmalingam), are not for conferences and seminars. They are jobs which find the mother of two eradicating targets amid nefarious dealings of a shadowy agency known as Sovereign.

Much of the movie’s first half is focused on Emma trying to live a domestic life, while juggling her secret one. Sharing a young daughter with Dave, Caroline (Lucy Aliu), and with her role as stepmother to Dave’s teenage son Wyatt (Regan Bryan-Gudgeon), she longs for an assassin-free, peaceful, family-focused life.

Role Play is a movie that tries really hard…to be funny, to be suspenseful, to be mysterious. However, the film rarely succeeds at much of anything it sets out to do. Cuoco and Oyelowo not only fail to generate much chemistry together as a married couple, but the screenplay by Seth Owen lacks any hook that makes us care about anything transpiring on screen. Instead, director Thomas Vincent rehashes bits and pieces we have seen countless times before - private investigators, pointless trips to Europe, ambiguous characters who may be good or bad, fights in fancy houses, and all the familiar tropes which come in movies like this one.

Rated R for a handful of swear words, Vincent largely goes bloodless on the violence. The “disguises” Emma wears on the job are laughable and obvious, making the ability to locate her through surveillance and/or other intelligence operations seem incredibly easy.

Cuoco, who has shown fantastic comedic talent in both “The Big Bang Theory” and her Emmy-nominated turn in “The Flight Attendant,” seems out of her depth and not the most convincing of secret assassins. Oyelowo, an acclaimed and talented actor, Emmy-nominated in his own right, seems caught in the wash of the film’s haphazard and scattershot tone and pacing.

In the end, with key plot points left unresolved and a rather hasty ending, Role Play never feels believable or genuine. Instead, it feels like a movie pretending to be something it is not.

CAST & CREW

Starring: Kaley Cuoco, David Oyelowo, Bill Nighy, Connie Nielsen, Rudi Dharmalingam, Lucia Aliu, Regan Bryan-Gudgeon, Simon Delaney, Sonita Henry

Director: Thomas Vincent
Written by: Seth Owen
Release Date: January 12, 2024
Amazon Prime Video