Ever since Netflix declared the return of the moribund studio romcom with its “Summer of Love” in 2018, the company has churned out a steady stream of formulaic – or, to quote the burn in many a review, “algorithmic” – at-home fare. The genre didn’t so much reboot as mutate for a new streaming home with a now distinctive style: baseline watchable, sheen-y, disposable. I’ve reviewed probably a dozen of them and can only recall a handful. The few that have stuck – To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Set It Up – have endured in large part because of its stars’ charisma, without which a romcom has little hope. Such was the case with 2019’s Someone Great, a middling movie elevated to memorable by the breezy charm of Gina Rodriguez.
The erstwhile Jane the Virgin star has a natural affinity for the romantic lead: megawatt smile, puppy-dog eyes, caffeinated energy, a preternaturally sunny presence striking the highly prized sweet spot between gorgeous and relatable. She is deservedly the main attraction of Players, a new Netflix romcom released on Valentine’s Day starring Rodriguez as Mack, a Brooklyn-based sports journalist looking to up her playbook of romantic entrapment.
As with Amazon’s concurrently released Upgraded, starring Camila Mendes, Players, directed by Trish Sie (Pitch Perfect 3) from a script by Whit Anderson, is another case of a veteran small-screen star’s magnetism outweighing a film’s more discordant or patently ridiculous elements. In this case, the many schemes to score a one-night stand run by Mack and her crew – her fellow journalist and enthusiastic straight-man Adam (Damon Wayans Jr), the catty, carnal Brannagan (Augustus Prew) and Brannagan’s somewhat hapless brother Little (Joel Courtney, of Netflix’s The Kissing Booth movies). They’re sports people – Mack especially is a diehard Yankees fan – for whom sex and romance is pure strategy and payoff, Xs and Os on the whiteboard. Players is at times too sitcom-y in its abstraction – everything is a play, sex the score, nothing for keeps. (At least it shows some sex on-screen, though it’s of the vigorous, slapstick variety.)
That is, until Mack beds Nick Marshall (Lucifer’s Tom Ellis), an award-winning war journalist whose accolades, experience and money spark envy, a feeling sometimes indistinguishable from lust, or love. Suddenly it’s the playoffs: convert a one-night stand into a romance because, as Mack puts it, “I’m 33 and I’m exhausted and I want an adult.” Or as Brannagan describes the task in one of the film’s many funny-ish bits on modern dating, “undoing simple dick brain”.