Poor Alan Ritchson

Prime Video’s new movie Playdate is a Kevin James action movie. That’s basically all you need to know. Kevin James was making terrible movies at the height of his fame, and that was 15 years ago. You can imagine how much worse even this is. I mean: It’s his follow-up to Guns Up, directed by Edward John Drake — the guy behind a lot of those very late-career Bruce Willis movies no one saw. Make of that what you will.

Playdate is bad. It’s borderline unwatchable, even by family action standards. Mark Wahlberg’s Family Plan was also a “family action movie,” and it was bad, but Playdate makes Family Plan look like the Die Hard of the genre.

Here’s the short and skinny: Kevin James plays Brian, an unemployed accountant married to a character played by Sarah Chalke, who — along with another character played by Isla Fisher — is in the movie for maybe eight minutes before disappearing entirely, presumably just long enough to appear in the trailer. Brian is struggling to bond with his stepson, so he sets up a playdate with Jeff (Alan Ritchson), who claims to be a stay-at-home dad. Things go sideways when mercenaries show up to kill them and recover Jeff’s “son,” who — spoiler — isn’t his son at all, but a super-soldier cloned from Jeff’s DNA.

It’s a little like Hanna if that movie had been bludgeoned in the face with a two-by-four made of Silly Putty and Kool-Aid. Even calling Playdate a waste of time is a waste of time. It’s a Kevin James family movie, and that tells you everything.

…except this: Alan Ritchson deserves better. And not just because he’s Reacher or seems like a genuinely kind guy in real life. He deserves better because he’s actually kind of funny — no small feat given the material he’s stuck with here. Nothing in this movie is remotely salvageable, but Ritchson has real comic timing. It’s not the dry humor he uses on Reacher; this is big, broad, stupid comedy, and he’s still goofy and charismatic enough to make you wish someone would cast him in a decent action comedy to take advantage of that.

And maybe someone will. Dwayne Johnson made some lousy family films early in his career — though even The Tooth Fairy isn’t as bad as Playdate — and that eventually led to better things. We could use another Dwayne Johnson type, because Johnson is played out and John Cena can’t take all the roles. Alan Ritchson more than deserves Cena’s spillover. Give this man an action buddy comedy with a real partner who isn’t Kevin James. Pair him with someone like Sam Richardson and make a movie people actually want to watch, not something a hungover parent tosses on for their eight-year-old while they sleep it off, because even an eight-year-old will be bored by this.

Alan Ritchson deserves better than a bad Kevin James comedy. At the very least, he deserves a bad Adam Sandler comedy.