I do enjoy a Kaley Cuoco project from time to time. Not Meet Cute, but there are some other things like The flight Attendant that I enjoyed. This Amazon movie isn’t quite as fun as it should be, but it does have some solid audio description.
Kaley plays Emma, who has a loving husband (David Oyelowo), and the idyllic family lifestyle complete with kids. But, her family has no idea she’s actually an assassin. When she and her husband discuss spicing things up with a little role play, he never imagined that he might get sucked into this world of murder and intrigue. Supporting Cuoco and Oyelowo are Bill Nighy and Connie Nielsen. This hails from a fairly unknown directorr, who happened to also help one of Amazon’s biggest hits, Reacher.
I know Kaley probably wants to be taken more seriously as an actress, but there is an element of fun that is missing from this film. I just thought it was too dark, too serious to really have a good time with. The plot is certainly there, but perhaps because Oyelowo isn’t known particularly for comedy, they decided to navigate around that? He was fantastic on Paramount Plus’s limited series Lawman, but here he also feels out of place like Cuoco. Neither of these actors are right for this, but both try and make it work, and they are both deeply talented in their own right.
The audio description is one of the few tracks that actually really gets into the description of what these people look like, not just because assassins sometimes change their identity, but because the co-lead is black. So, this is one of those rare occasions where someone bothers to mention that a film has any sort of representation at all. Of course, it can’t just point out the one black guy, so it has to do more for the other characters as well, so we avoid what I call “defaulting”, the idea that unless told otherwise, assume your character is white. It’s my belief that the best way to handle this is to describe everyone as they are, as a sighted audience would be able to see and pick up on certain things. Representation matters, and often, especially in movies and shows aimed at kids, children of color aren’t hearing or seeing themselves on screen because the audio description is being told to avoid mentioning race or ethnicity. An incredibly diverse cast, like the one in Percy Jackson and the Olympians at Disney plus, has no specifics to any of the characters, yet they made strong intentional casting choices that represented a broad cross section of children. You don’t get that from the description.
This movie is made for adults, but these things still matter. It’s one of the reasons that the AMPAS is requiring all Best Picture contenders to meet certain DEI requirements. That’s what is great about Role Play, is because of the way the film is structured and cast, they made a decision to represent everyone as they would be seen by the audience, providing that there’s enough time to describe every character.
My only problem is that this movie should have been a lot more fun, and it just isn’t. A talented cast is kinda wasted in a film that isn’t terrible, but winds up being incredibly average, and borderline forgettable. If you are looking for a hit man comedy, or something else like this, there are a number of films that had a lot more fun with this plot. Instead of this, how about tracking down Tom cruise and Nicole Kidman in Knight And Day.
Final Grade: C
