Playdate, 2025.
Directed by Luke Greenfield.
Starring Kevin James, Alan Ritchson, Sarah Chalke, Alan Tudyk, Stephen Root, and Isla Fisher.
SYNOPSIS:
Brian has just been fired from his job. He becomes a stay-at-home dad. He accepts a playdate invitation from another stay-at-home dad who turns out to be a loose cannon.
This is nuts to say about a Luke Greenfield comedy starring Kevin James and Alan Ritchson, but Playdate becomes so out there that one feels compelled to tiptoe around what the story is actually about. Of course, by saying that, the film already sounds far more interesting when it’s actually damn near unwatchable and insufferable.
Nothing less should be expected from the director of Let’s Be Cops (the shortest review I have ever written simply because I loathed it so much it wasn’t worth talking about, which is also a notion this film is in the same company) and The Girl Next Door (with its infamous perving scene present here as part of a running gag where two boys continuously end up watching inappropriate movies together in the backseat of the car with their respective fathers), who, I shit you not, is on record as a filmmaker prioritizing character in his works.
Playdate (from a screenplay by Neil Goldman) has nothing resembling real characters. It’s allegedly a comedy that teams Kevin James and Alan Ritchson as stay-at-home dads (for different reasons) with their respective sons, Lucas (Benjamin Pajak) and CJ (Banks Pierce), who befriend one another. There is a juxtaposition in that CJ takes after his father in the masculinity department, with the two consistently roughhousing.
Meanwhile, Lucas is enrolled in lacrosse, which his father coaches, with his true passion being flamboyant dancing, which the filmmakers seem to believe is a homophobic joke that wouldn’t have been funny even 20 years ago, when such regressive humor was typical and accepted. Such videos are posted on a social media platform called Dik Dok, another example of this film’s terrible sense of humor.
Brian (Kevin James) also wants Lucas to hang around the two to help with a bullying problem he deceives his wife, Emily (Sarah Chalke), into believing he can solve himself, even though he is pushed around at his accounting firm job. As for Jeff (Alan Ritchson), he is a disgraced US soldier whose entire persona is played for tasteless jokes that consistently ruin any semblance of believability, especially when the film doubles back and wants us to take his past seriously. The part about this allowing the actor to poke fun at his action star credentials makes sense and is fun in theory, but it cannot be stressed enough how god-awfully unfunny the material is here.
One might be under the impression that the structure of Playdate is a series of hangouts gone wrong with clashing personalities and Jeff getting out every last nerve of Brian in a clichéd fashion. Well, that’s not technically wrong, but this is also a high-concept sci-fi film in ways so ludicrous that one doesn’t even know where to begin. It does lead to Alan Tudyk playing a character with an unmistakably Elon Musk-like wardrobe and Paul Walter Hauser as the only funny part of the movie (it’s an uncredited role. Perhaps he was embarrassed to be in this.)
It’s also not that the sci-fi ideas are lousy (any halfway decent filmmaker could have turned this into an adequate slapstick comedy/sci-fi hybrid about the meaning of family), but that Luke Greenfield’s comedic sensibilities are so insulting and rancid. He has no idea how to write characters that are more than one-note punchlines. There is no understanding of real human behavior, cranking up the comedic sequences to outrageous lengths that they aren’t funny but rather flat-out stupid. Then, when it’s time for some action within the sci-fi element, he’s, well, far out of his element. Playdate is comedy at its laziest, and not even a couple of goofy sci-fi ideas can salvage it.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★
Robert Kojder
