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Netflix Serves Up More Artificially-Generated Slop With 'Players'

By Petr Navovy | Film | February 19, 2024 |

By Petr Navovy | Film | February 19, 2024 |


players-review-header.png

Some films are just difficult to write about. When you see something great, like, for example, Afire, you can’t help but be effusive in your praise; the desire to get home and put your feelings into words is potent. Similarly, on the other end of the spectrum, when you watch something atrocious, like, say, Metal Lords, the bile rises up almost involuntarily in response—like smelling surströmming, the notoriously pungent Swedish delicacy of fermented herring that’s been the subject of countless viral videos featuring people struggling to eat it while retching.

And then there’s something like Players, the latest ‘Netflix film’ that adds yet more evidence to the pile that the streaming giant is farming out its ‘content creation’ to an AI that hasn’t fully grasped the concepts of ‘humanity’, ‘cinema’, or ‘humor’ just yet. If it’s the same bot that’s also responsible for Best Christmas Ever, then to be fair we have to congratulate it. Well done, robot usurper, you’ve already done significantly better than your earlier effort! Unfortunately, bars don’t get much lower than Best Christmas Ever. But I just don’t know how to write about something like Players. It’s so blandly bad and boring that my brain can’t grasp an angle.

I guess we can start with the ‘story’. The premise of Players is this: Gina Rodriguez stars as Mack, a thirty-something local sports writer working for a dying newspaper, who spends her weekends with her group of male friends crafting elaborate ploys to get laid. These typically involve ingenious plans like having Mack have a loud conversation at a bar with one of her mates about how she has to break up with him because he’s far too generous and giving in both life and love. Naturally, as a result, any woman within earshot of this performance just can’t help but fall straight into the arms of Mack’s friend. The film spends painful minutes throughout its runtime having the characters deliver asinine names for these ‘plays’ that they’ve developed and cataloged over the years. They deliver them as if they’re the funniest things ever written, but it’s always something like ‘feed the badger’ or ‘adrift at sea’, but much stupider than that. It’s annoying in its smugness, and the vacuous, surface level allusions it makes to the sacred cinematic tradition of heist sequences would have made me angry if I wasn’t trying my best these days to save my energies for only the most important things in life.

Damon Wayans Jr., who can be very funny in the right role (which isn’t this), stars here as Adam, Mack’s best friend and member of her hookup heists crew who has recently started to take a back seat to their antics as he feels himself getting too old for that nonsense and would now prefer to settle down. Shock, horror—the person he really has feelings for is Mack herself! Double shock and triple horror—she might also have feelings for him without realizing it! Players has an hour and forty-five minutes of tedious run time to get through first though before this poorly fleshed out dynamic can run its course. For some reason, it feels it needs to subject us to poorly edited, unfunny improv sequences bereft of gags, both visual or spoken, starring uninteresting, bland characters, all set against the backdrop of an anonymously shot New York. But hey, if you want half-assed plot, joke, and character elements that hint like they might actually go somewhere for a minute but end up going straight into the bin, then you’re in luck! Players has ‘em!

Tom Ellis (the bloke from Lucifer) also shows up here as Nick. Nick is a famous writer who is tall and otherwise has the kind of ‘British accent’ that makes me grind my teeth (‘Oopsie daisy!’ he says as he almost knocks over an antique vase). Nick is Mack’s main victim love interest throughout Players. She (spoilers, but who cares) coordinates a vast group stalking effort in order to get him to fancy and date her, but then eventually gets upset when she asks him to critique her writing but he does so too harshly. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a posh knob and he does the critiquing in an inconsiderate knob-like fashion, but unless I missed something (which is entirely possible because Players has a habit of sending your brain into momentary fugue states) the film asks the audience for sympathy for Mack in this situation while never reckoning with her industrial scales of emotional manipulation. It feels a bit off. Though I guess we’ve had decades and decades of male protagonists doing exactly that, in similarly crap films, so hooray for progress?