Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Role Play’ on Amazon Prime Video, an Action-Comedy Starring David Oyelowo and Kaley Cuoco

This week on Relentlessly Recycled Plots Theatre is Role Play (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video), starring Kaley Cuoco as a suburban mom who’s secretly a cold-blooded damn killer. Yes, you may sigh, and if at first you don’t succeed, sigh, sigh again. But! Before you touch that dial, let it be known that Cuoco and co-star David Oyelowo do their damnedest to stir a couple of tasty marshmallows into this lukewarm cup of cocoa – now let’s see if that’s enough, or if we’re left to just joylessly masticate soggy lumps of puffed sugar.

ROLE PLAY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Opening shot: A toilet. Foreshadowing? I hope not! Emma (Cuoco) is in the public can playing Pistachio Disguisey, putting in colored contact lenses and strapping on a brunette-bob wig so nobody will recognize her when she kills the mitochondria out of some sad mofo. Then she flies home and her cute moppet daughter runs up and says Mommyyyyyyyyyyyy! See, the kids and hubby Dave (Oyelowo) think she’s been off attending some mid-level-management corporate team-building event in Nebraska, and not putting knives and bullets into people until this mortal coil goes dark and their souls pass into the great whatever. See, it’s this kind of setup that makes you wonder about a family’s banking situation. Must be weird for Dave to see some shadowy cabal direct-deposit a couple hundred thou in the checking account. Ah, I guess Emma probably handles all the bills and budget, right? Sure. Seems a bit shaky, but sure.

Anyhow. Emma’s been so heavily distracted lately – possibly by the haunting sounds of the final breaths of all the people she’s killed in cold blood – that she forgets their anniversary. So she has an idea to spice up their doldrummy marriage that she surely finds ironic but Dave wouldn’t because he’s clueless about her ability to slap on a hairpiece and commit murder: They’ll get a fancy hotel room in the city, meet in the bar and pretend to be strangers hooking up for the night. Sex-ay! 

But, little do they know, they’re pieces of shit heading straight for the fan. Emma slides into a little black dress and before Dave can see her there sipping a martini, a handsome gent named Bob (Bill Nighy) starts hitting on her like a six-year-old at the whack-a-mole game. Dave arrives in time to hear Bob to say things like “she kills me, this one” and that she’s someone “a lot of men might kill for,” so consider the drift caught. By Emma, not Dave. Well, not yet at least. Once they get back home and Dave sees the news story about this Bob fella being found dead as hell in his suite, well, that’s when the subterfuge starts to un-terfuge. And before long our guy Dave finds himself at an inflection point: Time to split? Or support His Wife the Sociopath? In reality, it’d be the former. But in movies? Well. You know. NO SPOILERS.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: We just saw a variation of this plot a month ago in The Family Plan. And less than a year ago in Ghosted. And many times before and after Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Performance Worth Watching: Who know Oyelowo had such serious comedy chops? He’s always relatable as the family guy blindsided by some far-beyond-fetched truths, but his portrait of an exasperated man avoids cliches and gins up several laughs as his character’s deeply conflicted feelings churn in his guts. 

Memorable Dialogue: “This is A LOT,” Dave says when asked to comprehend the insanity his life has become – and it’s 100 percent Oyelowo’s delivery that inspires a big laugh.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Cuoco and Oyelowo show professionalism and commitment to the material that it absolutely doesn’t deserve. This screenplay is off-the-rack junk, stale and predictable, with a plot so ramshackle, there isn’t enough superglue in all of the Amazon warehouses to hold it together. And the action sequences are blah and choppy, director Thomas Vincent either hamstrung by a modest budget or committed to mediocrity.

But – and this but bears a lot of weight – I was consistently nagged by the feeling that Role Play should be so much worse. Take the scene where Dave is hauled in by authorities and asked to explain his and Emma’s interactions with Bob prior to his becoming a corpse: Oyelowo tells the truth in such a manner as to make him sound like he’s lying, and that’s the type of floor-routine comic-acting gymnastics that make you forget you’re watching formulaic tripe. Well, temporarily forget, at least, allowing us to coast on the fumes of goodwill through some unremarkable scenes until we get to the next moment that allows Cuoco and Oyelowo to interact in a manner that almost convinces us that this whole stupidass movie is a passable exaggerated metaphor for how a couple might work through the inevitable low points of their marriage.

This all hinges precariously on the highly problematic premise, which insists that we sympathize with a character who routinely deals out death with dead eyes like an amoral butcher. But hey, at least she can compartmentalize that part of herself so effectively that she can be a terrifically loving wife and mother! We’re asked to lean into the nice part of her and forget about the nasty part, which, as Dave might say, is A LOT. And that’s when the bulk of our sympathies shift to this nice, average guy caught in an impossible situation. You wouldn’t make the same decisions he does, but as ever, that’s the difference between real people and movie people.

Our Call: I dunno. Role Play is crapola, and its moral core is rotten and maggoty. But if you toggle your brain switch to the OFF position as needed, you might find yourself laughing way more than you expected. So STREAM IT, he said, with a big heaping pile of reservations.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.