Position Play premieres on Prime Video January 12.
It’s simple to see why Kaley Cuoco may wish to play an element like Emma Brackett, the professionally duplicitous however basically good-hearted heroine on the middle of Position Play. Emma – not her actual identify – is each a spouse and mom who claims to work in finance and a paid murderer skilled by a shadowy group. As she ultimately explains to her husband, Dave (David Oyelowo), she doesn’t contemplate her life in suburban New Jersey a canopy : Her love for her household is actual, even when her attendance at boring conferences in varied Midwestern American cities just isn’t. The premise is actually a high-concept metaphor for Cuoco’s personal profession, through which she’s been on TV in some kind or one other for virtually the complete twenty first century. Having performed Penny on The Large Bang Idea for upwards of a decade, she’s certainly conscious of the way it feels to reside as another person – albeit not somebody this deadly.
Whether or not this makes Cuoco significantly good as Emma, nonetheless, is one other matter. In equity to its stranded actors, Position Play itself is a 95-minute identification disaster. It comes on like a True Lies-style motion comedy the place a pair is shaken out of mid-marriage doldrums by the revelation that certainly one of them is a lethal super-spy. But it surely waffles continuously between faux-psychological hazard, action-thriller momentum, and cutesy farce. Finally its misbegotten style turns into clear: It’s a type of streaming-service capers, like Ghosted or Purple Discover, that really feel like the results of filmmakers half-watching the 1963 Audrey Hepburn-Cary Grant team-up Charade at a bar with the pontificate and deciding they obtained the gist of it.
The title comes from a brainstorm Emma and Dave must carry some pleasure again into their kid-laden, work-clogged lives: They’ll rent a sitter, verify right into a lodge below an assumed identify, and role-play a first-time assembly at a bar. Dave’s alternative of pretend identify will get one of many film’s few laughs, but it surely’s again to well-trod Household Plan territory when a mysterious, insinuating stranger (Invoice Nighy) from Emma’s secret life intervenes and the reality about her job comes out. How did this stranger discover knowledgeable shapeshifter Emma? Effectively, she has appeared on a “darkish internet most-wanted” checklist, no matter that’s.
It gained’t be the final time an fascinating query is answered with a just-go-with-it shrug. To mitigate some ethical queasiness about Emma’s work, Position Play has her insisting that her contract killing jobs have been occasional, simply the minimal wanted to maintain her household protected each financially and bodily, with out explaining why her job appears to run her ragged anyway. (As described and depicted, her murdering takes up roughly 72 hours per 30 days.) Issues aren’t any clearer on the homefront: The script repeatedly emphasizes that Emma and Dave first met eight years earlier, regardless of their oldest little one not wanting a day below 10, a minor element that nonetheless underlines how these youngsters exist merely as a plot level to be probably endangered.
Generally stars can overcome this sort of sloppiness with shared megawatt charisma. However the cut up between Cuoco and Oyelowo might charitably be described as unbalanced: She overacts wildly, making faces not suited to the extreme close-ups she retains being given, whereas he spends many of the runtime sporting a glance of consternation. Possibly they’re speculated to be mismatched at first, however they by no means sync up. Cuoco leans on her sitcom coaching and pulls a Jennifer Aniston, going for laughs by repeating character’s names continuously and brusquely and customarily contributing to modern display screen comedy’s insistence on the side-splitting potential in each utterance of “Bob.” Oyelowo, in the meantime, appears barely conscious that he’s in a comedy.
And perhaps he’s not! Position Play usually appears genuinely unsure, and never in an thrilling, genre-bending approach. The unconvincing espionage materials – a struggle in a Berlin nightclub doesn’t an Atomic Blonde make – has no actual connection to the specifics of Emma and Dave’s marriage. The the explanation why their relationship is wilting are by no means explored; it’s simply taken as a right that it’s, aside from when the plot requires them to like and cherish one another. Nighy is the one one within the solid who strikes the right tone for this preposterous materials: Droll but dedicated, oddly menacing but nonetheless comedian. In different phrases, he understands easy methods to role-play. The remainder of the film is the dangerous type of charade.