Kaley Cuoco and Davis Oyelowo fail to launch in Role Play as a gender-swapped True Lies

Role Play. // Photo by Reiner Bajo

It’s no secret that it’s hard to find a good new release in January or February. Apart from leftover 2023 awards contenders, all that’s on offer are the red-headed stepchildren the studios would rather write off.

For theatrical releases, this makes an annoying kind of sense. It does seem a little odd that with audiences looking for something new, streamers haven’t yet stepped into that void to offer something worth watching. Case in point: MGM and Amazon’s Role Play, a forgettable action thriller that you could easily (and probably should) skip right past on the new release queue.

Emma Brackett (Kaley Cuoco) is your typical workaholic mother. She’s constantly out of town on business, but at home is a dedicated wife to her husband Dave (Davis Oyelowo), and mother to kids Catherine (Lucia Aliu) and Wyatt (Reagan Bryan-Gudge). 

When Emma, on yet another business trip, forgets her wedding anniversary, she tries to make it up to Dave by suggesting a date night and some role playing at a fancy downtown hotel.

On the night of their intended romantic rendezvous, Dave winds up stuck in traffic and Emma is intercepted by the charismatic Bob (Billy Nighy). It turns out Emma’s “business trips” are cover for her real job as a covert assassin. Her last gig drew heat, and now Bob has come to collect. When Dave finally arrives at the hotel, he’s dragged into his wife’s secret life, and the pair must work together to survive. Hijinks, as you may have guessed, ensue.

Unfortunately, the above synopsis makes more sense than anything that actually happens in Role Play’s 100-minute runtime. The film features a lot of warmed-over plot points from better movies, here played straight rather than for zany fun. That more dramatic approach might have worked, were Oyelowo not played as a comic foil, constantly stammering over his own words as if he were starring in a bland sitcom rather than a bland actioner. 

With all its jarring quick cuts, Role Play oddly feels like a throwback to the late 90s or early aughts, where it still might have been uninspiring but would at least be stylistically on-point. Unfortunately, we live in a post-John Wick world, where international action cinema has raised its aesthetic and practical stuntwork standards considerably. There’s barely enough action in Role Play to include it in the genre, and what action there is fails to register as exciting. 

To the film’s credit, at least things move along at a fair clip, though you get the feeling that the pacing is simply to keep viewers from asking too many questions. Why would Dave willingly travel overseas when he knows a cadre of baddies is watching his every move? Don’t ask questions! Tune out and enjoy the shootouts! Considering how familiar audiences are with hitmen (and hitwomen) in shows and movies, sloppy plotting like this is courting danger.

Role Play wants to be a grittier True Lies, but never invests enough in striking that balance. Seth W. Owen and Andrew Baldwin’s script aimlessly wanders through each scene, pausing only to pull an awkwardly telegraphed twist or sudden drastic shift in tone. Rather than being self-aware of its genre tropes and twisting them to its advantage, Role Play is just derivative and airless.

Ultimately, Role Play feels like it embodies the current content-heavy trouble that plagues the streaming industry. In racing to fill space with an endless supply of new entertainment, studios and streaming companies (though now they’re increasingly one and the same) have let quality control lapse. Whether that’s because they aren’t paying attention or because they think we’ll watch any algorithmically-determined slop they force on us is up for debate.

Role Play wants to cater to as wide an audience as possible, but in the process loses any identity of its own.