Players review – Netflix’s Valentine’s romcom is a genre upgrade

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.

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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”.

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The lengths that the generally winsome crew go to lock it down, up to and including stalking and binders full of personal data, are outlandish (and occasionally humorous), but the stakes feel real. Though Mack is a caricature of a guys’ girl, the type to drink tall boy Sapporos, eat greasy Chinese takeout out of the carton and watch wrestling, who hits the bar every night looking hot and toned but never works out, Rodriguez keeps her yearning – for love, for professional success, for change and direction – at the surface. Anderson’s script is savvy enough to render Nick as neither villain nor flawless catch – he’s an adult person, and as such more complicated than his stats. But who hasn’t mistook the idea of someone for love?

Players is self-aware enough, too, to poke fun at its own holes, such as how Mack has no female friends, which introduces the receptionist Ashley (YouTuber Liza Koshy) and Adam’s new girlfriend Claire (SNL’s Ego Nwodim) into the crew. (To be fair, as Mack says, it’s difficult to make friends as an adult.) Sie’s direction, though at times reaching for too much flair, is solid and unusually grounded for this micro-genre; the Brooklyn of this film, bowling alleys and pool bars and the promenade near the bridge, maps on to the actual borough.

In the storied history of romcoms disconnected from any real understanding of journalism, Players has more substance than most – there’s a real grit to Mack’s career as a local sports journalist, though it’s hard to believe there’s a full Brooklyn in-office newspaper with a local sports section in the year 2024. (Much about the movie, from the journalism to the fashion to the attempts to couple the Netflix aesthetic with on-location gravitas, feels more suited for the mid-2010s.)

Still, some things are evergreen. Rodriguez’s Mack is easy to root for; her confused attempts to settle in her early 30s, however far-fetched in practice, emotionally lived in. Wayans, who honed his comedic timing on the spiritually related sitcom New Girl, is well-suited as the long-overlooked best friend turned possible romantic interest. Ellis, as Nick, is suitably handsome, debonair and not all that he’s cracked up to be. Such is the game of dating. Players may trip on its gimmicks at times, but there’s enough lived experience beneath the rapid-fire quips to work. For a streaming economy romcom, particularly of the Netflix variety, it’s batting far above average.

• Players is out now on Netflix