Netflix was not thinking of two 17-year-olds sitting on a couch in a basement lit by LED lights when they were making their latest movie Players, and it shows.
I never turn on a movie wanting to see people roughly the age of my aunts and uncles dating and doing other such activities. Netflix made this movie for 30-year-old women bored at home and needing hope for romance in their lives, which is fair; young adults have all the good rom-coms, so I can see why someone in their 30s would want a movie targeted at them.
Sadly, for the lonely 30-year-old people who needed a good rom-com about people their age, Players was a disaster of a movie. I cheered when it ended because I could finally do anything other than stare at these disgusting characters.
Players follows a group of four (eventually five) journalists who work at a newspaper that is slowly laying off more and more people. The main character Mackenzie, or Mack as she prefers to be called—played by Gina Rodriguez— is struggling to write a feature good enough to secure her job, but this is forgotten about entirely when she meets Nick (Tom Ellis). Nick is the supposed love interest and turns Mack from her playboy stage to a real adult relationship stage. Before Mack meets Nick, she, Adam (Damon Wayans Jr.), Bran (Augustus Prew), and Little (Joel Courtney) spend their nights at bars coming up with plays—like in sports games—to seduce people they find attractive.
I found this group of people to be disgusting due to them making lie after lie to win over people who they would throw away the next morning. Plus, they are all so annoying. Mack only cares about herself and the end goal, never seeing the pressure she is putting on other people to get her own happy ending, and she gives sports girls a bad rap, droning on endlessly about sports in conversations that have nothing to do with them. Bran is the worst of them all, though: whiny, annoying, and any other similar adjective that could describe him; I wish I could have punched him through the screen. Little is weird, but otherwise fine. Adam is a hypocrite and acts far too high and mighty for someone as gross as he is. Nick is a typical egotistical British man. There is only one character that I like: Ashley (Liza Koshy). Ashley was normal, chill, and wasn’t extremely annoying like every other character.
The fashion choices were also an odd part of the movie. Little, for some reason, was always wearing fishnet gloves and bright colors like he went shopping at Forever 21, hoping to look like a model from the ’90s. Mack was dressed like she was in her early 20s, which is fine, but if the point of the movie is to show the adulting Mack is going through, people would think her wardrobe would match that. Other than Little and Mack, the outfits were normal.
I truly did not enjoy a second of this movie. While I like the actors in other productions, such as Rodriguez in Jane The Virgin, their acting was subpar, though I am sure it had to do with the awful script as well. The body language, the lines, and the entire presence of the characters felt far too forced as if the actors knew this movie was going to be a flop and were trying too hard to make their part stand out.
Players had the standard rom-com script to follow, but Netflix wanted to break the mold and make it for an older crowd. They tried to make it edgier, and yet, they checked every box on the rom-com checklist and made a movie that is a complete waste of screening space.
