PLAYERS (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Players, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 14, 2024

A group of four friends have come up with a variety of games or tricks to convince people to have sex with them. Many would call this lying, and others might try to determine just how despicable this behavior is. None of those people made Players, which assumes and embraces the notion that these characters are just having fun. Forget the people who get scammed by them. They had it coming, apparently.

Mack (Gina Rodriguez) makes a point early on to say this isn't lying for sex. It's gifting a complete stranger with a story to be remembered. This is the equivalent of taking money from someone's wallet and arguing that it wasn't stealing. It's giving that person the experience of buying the thief something nice.

Mack and her long-time pals—Adam (Damon Wayans Jr.), Brannagan (Augustus Prew), and Little (Joel Courtney—have been doing this for so long that they have cutesy names for all the schemes they pull. A smarter movie might try to at least have some sort of fun with the names and the "games," but Whit Anderson's screenplay just tosses them around here and there, without any sense of what the scams are and how clever these fraudulent gimmicks might be. Maybe it's for the best we don't see that, actually. It feels dirty enough being told to root for these characters without more specific evidence of just how awful they could be.

Perhaps the fact that Mack is a woman is supposed to make us feel a bit better about it. After all, we've had decades of women being the targets of such lies in movies and longer than that in real life, so turnaround, as they suppose, is fair play. Then again, who's to say that the character was always a woman, given a gender-neutral name like that? These characters are non-specific that such a swap would be easy enough for Anderson and/or director Trish Sie to accomplish.

Either way, it doesn't matter that Mack is a woman. She and her friends aren't fun people with whom to spend time. After years of meaningless sex with people whom she has conned, Mack, a local sports reporter for a New York City newspaper, is ready for a real relationship, of course. Her ideal candidate is Nick (Tom Ellis), an esteemed journalist who has just joined the paper's staff. She figures this out, by the way, after getting Nick to sleep with her with a "play" that basically amounts to hanging out with him at a bar until everyone else leaves. With this revelation, we now have to wonder if the members of this group are as unimaginative as they are duplicitous, too.

Her apparently newfound sense of wanting a real and grown-up romantic relationship basically amounts to Mack lying repeatedly about who she is, what she wants, how she feels, and so on. Oh, she also enlists the three friends to stalk Nick to such a degree that they know how much of his day is spent sleeping and on the toilet. Don't ask how any of them figured that out for a daily graph of Nick's routine, because it would probably land them in some legal trouble to go along with moral morass in which they're stuck. Mack "coincidentally" keeps bumping into Nick, and soon enough, she's spending time with him, going on dates, and getting closer and closer to having a drawer in his apartment reserved for some of her clothes.

In theory, this is a romantic comedy. For obvious reasons from this setup, neither the romance nor the comedy is effective or, for that matter, feasible. It doesn't matter that Mack has some sadness in her past, that Adam clearly has a thing for her, or that brothers Brannagan and Little are so pathetic that even their successful scams don't turn out as they hoped. There's nothing sincere about these characters, and because we know who they really are and how they behave, it's not as if we're particularly looking for a reason to sympathize with them on any level.

Thankfully, the movie doesn't work too hard to give us one, either. Lies pile upon lies. Mack finds herself looking to please Nick, instead of being who she really is (Honestly, anything might be an improvement for her and the rest of them), and might miss what's right in front of her as a result. The weirdest part of Players—and the thing that really solidifies how out of whack its moral compass is—is how it finally tries to convince us that the victim here is the one who's actually in the wrong.

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