REVIEW: ‘Players’ Or How To Girlboss A Rom-Com In 10 Days

Directed by Trish Sie and written by Whit Anderson, Players is an exceptionally aggravating Netflix Original rom-com. Mack (Gina Rodriguez) and her band of best friends and newspaper coworkers have spent the past fifteen years or so going out and running plays to pick up hookups. Literal plays. They have names and maneuvers and everything. Each of them has a role to help one another make sure they’re going home with the hottest person at the bar. But when Mack meets Nick (Tom Ellis), a fancy British writer who nearly won a Pulitzer once, Mack gets to thinking it’s time to grow up and settle down. Of course, she can’t just court Nick like a normal person. She has to get her crew together for one last play.

Players starts off really proud of itself for having a female lead who isn’t afraid to ask for exactly what she wants from men. She’s calling the shots with her friend group of all men, including her best friend Adam (Damon Wayans Jr.). And she’s pulling every trick in the literal playbook to make sure she’s snogging whoever she likes when and how she’d like to. For about ten minutes, it works as a setup for what kind of character Mack is. It nearly differentiates Players from the pack by letting its front woman be fully self-actualized.

But the schtick gets old very fast the more in your face it gets. No matter how good Rodriguez is at playing the girlboss role here, she also has an entirely separate “one of the guys” trope going on. The men around her, including the token bi-friend Brannagan (Augustus Prew), are too dude-bro. Mack is a sports writer. All of their socializing is at sports bars and bowling alleys. There’s even a whole group conversation at one point about how Mack doesn’t have female friends. Another woman, Ashley (Liza Koshy), does eventually join their band. By then, though, her constant references to being a Zoomer are too petty to cover up for how heavily the movie layers on Mack’s status as “one of the guys.”

The combo of personalities isn’t Mack’s downfall as a character. It all works fine and could have been good, even. Perhaps in a movie where the point was dissecting the dangers of girlbossing too close to the sun or of having a friend group of mostly immature men, her character would have popped. Instead, Players completely cops out and settles for basic rom-com malaise that you sniff out 25 seconds in. In the throws of love, Mack basically stops girlbossing and ceases to be one of the boys all at once. Her personality just becomes a “rom-com protagonist who is clearly in the wrong relationship.”

There is nothing fun about watching a movie where people who you know will never be together in the end avoid having real conversations for an hour and a half. The scenes between Mack and Adam all work well enough. It’s a stretch to say they have good chemistry, but at least they’re fun together, unlike Mack and Nick. But halfway through the movie, once all the shenanigans are through and Nick and Mack are together, it settles into something quite boring.

The moral of Players, if it accidentally had one, is that dating is dumb and pointless, and the only way to meet somebody is by happenstance. Even if this nihilistic take on dating is valid, it doesn’t make for good movie-watching. I can get that kind of reality check from my own dating history. Mack and Nick should have me believing that love is possible. Instead, I’m counting down the minutes until their inevitable break up. They have nothing in common, and their whole relationship is based on lies and plays. Mack and her friends keep running on him. It’s not convincing in the least. And worse, it’s not like it’s standing in the way of a different relationship you’re pining for either. There’s more excitement behind Ashley and Brannagan’s brother getting together than Mack and anybody else.

The plays are at least a little entertaining. Because you know they’re all going to work at the beginning of the movie, you can ignore the immaturity of it all and laugh at how intricate and ridiculous some of their courting tactics are. They use literal printed, spiral-bound books and meeting room poster presentations. It’s the recipe for some good comedy. And while it does warrant a couple of small chuckles, it’s still all for naught. When there’s no incentive to root for the main plot and no real sparks between the obvious end game, the second half is a snooze without their immaturity to at least laugh at. Adam literally loses half his personality as soon as he starts dating somebody seriously (Ego Nwodim). How are you supposed to be tantalized by him if he has a blank stare half the time?

Players has the bones of a decent rom-com, but it’s unsure who its main character should be. Is she struggling to outgrow her immature friends? Is she trying to learn to be less self-serious? She’s set up to go down so many paths and ends up stuck in a completely mundane scenario. A boring boyfriend, a boring end game, and boring monologues that make you wish she’d just stuck with girlbossing. If only the movie knew what kind of character Mack was supposed to be and had a half-interesting romance, it would have been successful.

Players is streaming now on Netflix.