As an arts critic, sometimes you have to fall on a grenade. There are titles like Playdate that force us to question our chosen profession, pondering why we\u2019d willingly subject ourselves to such mind-rotting Hollywood gruel. Luke Greenfield\u2019s atomically awful action-comedy may joke about waterboarding, but the true torture is sitting through this embarrassing, humorless wart on Prime Video\u2019s streaming catalog. It\u2019s not even 90 minutes before credits, yet in the moment threatens to become a Sisyphean purgatory with no escape.<\/p>\n
In this terrible film, Kevin James stars as Brian Jennings, a windbreaker-wearing manly man (or so he projects), recently fired from his forensic auditing gig. Brian\u2019s wife, Emily (Sarah Chalke), suggests that he try being a stay-at-home stepdad to connect with her bullied, dance-loving son Lucas (Benjamin Pajak). Brian tries to toss the ol\u2019 pigskin with Lucas at the park, but it\u2019s not the boy\u2019s forte. Enter ex-soldier Jeff Eamon (Alan Ritchson), the G.I. Joe-looking dad to the energetically feral CJ (Banks Pierce), who thinks he and Brian should be best friends. On the spot, they organize a playdate and hop in Jeff\u2019s van\u2014which is when the chaos begins.<\/p>\n
If this were a \u201990s comedy, there might still be a twinkle of ingenuity here, but the execution is barely on par with a last-minute MADtv sketch. Longtime sitcom writer Neil Goldman\u2019s work on Family Guy, Scrubs, and Community is nowhere to be found in the dry-as-a-desert Playdate. The odd couple of James and Ritchson sounds fine on paper\u2014King Of Queens<\/a> meets Blue Mountain State<\/a>\u2014but at no point in James\u2019 performance does he indicate that he would like to be anywhere near the set. The comedian appears to be held at gunpoint, stammering through unfunny lines with the same Eeyore-like expression in every scene. But it\u2019s not like Ritchson fares any better, reduced to the recurring gag of \u201cdoofus brute beats up children\u201d while occasionally saddled with off-key himbo humor.<\/p>\n As for the action beats, don\u2019t expect Reacher <\/a>to appear. Let\u2019s say Jeff isn\u2019t telling the whole truth; mercenaries are on his tail, but they aren\u2019t Jason Bourne. Ritchson punches nameless goons in a playplace changing room, but there\u2019s no real excitement to the choreography. Greenfield\u2019s film is always mugging for laughs that don\u2019t exist, at least, when it\u2019s not a Honda Odyssey commercial (this is the only reason Isla Fisher\u2019s playground \u201cMama Mafia\u201d leader finds her way on screen).<\/p>\n Kevin James shaves his head and picks up a pistol in Guns Up trailer<\/a>Kevin James to play pro golf “Wild Thing” John Daly in limited series<\/a><\/p>\n Playdate stifles the talents of not only James and Ritchson, or the underused Fisher, but of the other talented funnymen who appear as favors in bit parts. Paul Walter Hauser gets the closest to eliciting a smile with his role\u2019s scripted drek. Stephen Root plays Jeff\u2019s estranged lothario father, but the irresponsible old man gag grows tiresome before Root even attempts to land his first punchline. Then there\u2019s Alan Tudyk, playing the film\u2019s antagonist Simon Maddox, who strangely feels more like a cameo than a final boss to defeat. Perhaps there was more to the flimsy narrative left on the editing bay\u2019s floor, where there might have been actual attempts to develop any sense of an intriguing story. As it stands, Playdate is like an action-comedy subgenre speedrun that discards basic tenets of pacing and structure. The formula is wrong, yet barrel forward it must.<\/p>\n Even worse, it seems Greenfield built his ill-constructed film with spare parts. The overuse of ADR is wildly uneven, but at least these aural blemishes happen while the actors\u2019 mouths are hidden. Yet, in another scene where Ritchson repeats an insult, the filmmakers apparently wanted to dub a new line in post-production despite his face being fully in frame, leading to some of the ugliest mouth-reworking effects (that still doesn\u2019t match the audio) committed to screen. It\u2019s atrocious. Whether it\u2019s AI-generated<\/a> or not, it\u2019s the pinnacle of how unnatural and garish this technique can look. Perhaps nobody involved cares, because streaming films are now simply intended to be \u201ccontent\u201d played in the background of people\u2019s lives? Whatever the reasoning, the moment conveys how little the filmmakers and creative team respect their audience, their craft, and themselves.<\/p>\n There\u2019s nothing here to defend. Playdate substantiates every predetermined and conspiratorial stereotype about streaming titles being inherently \u201clesser\u201d than theatrical releases. Greenfield will have audiences begging for even a flash of the far superior laughs he achieved in\u2026The Animal<\/a> or Let\u2019s Be Cops<\/a>. When people complain about the death of mainstream comedies, it\u2019s bottomfeeding films like Playdate that are the genre\u2019s executioner. No energy, no wit, just a tasteless and tacky sequence of events that barely manages to clear the bar for what\u2019s still considered a movie.<\/p>\n Director: Luke Greenfield
Writer: Neil Goldman
Starring: Kevin James, Alan Ritchson, Sarah Chalke, Alan Tudyk, Stephen Root, Isla Fisher
Release Date: November 12, 2025 (Amazon Prime Video)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As an arts critic, sometimes you have to fall on a grenade. There are titles like Playdate that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":276834,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":{"0":"post-276833","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}