Kaley Cuoco cannot be confined. I don’t mean that in terms of the types of roles she plays—she’s always moving between three different, equally effective shades of plucky. Rather, Cuoco will not be chained to one streamer.
In the past few years, the former Big Bang Theory star has been eager to prove her skill after being tied to a network sitcom for so long, and she’s been hopping between different platforms to do it. She’s led two seasons of Max’s delectable series The Flight Attendant and four seasons as the voice of Harley Quinn in its raunchy Batman spinoff. Then there were two ventures on Peacock: a middling time travel movie followed by a super silly true crime comedy series.
Now, Cuoco is over on Prime Video with her new action-comedy Role Play, out Jan. 12. In the film, she plays only a slightly different shade of her usual character: A fast-talking, quick-witted thirtysomething in some kind of rut. This time, it’s in her marriage, as Cuoco’s character, Emma, is having trouble reconciling her career and home life with her husband, Dave (David Oyelowo). Emma is always in and out of town for work, making it hard to keep the spark alive—especially when her exhausting career of killing high-value targets for cash leaves her drained by the time she walks in the door to greet Dave and their two children.
This double-life premise is certainly nothing new, but Cuoco does bring her signature brand of loquacious enthusiasm to the role. But even with all of her energy, Cuoco and the equally formidable Oyelowo remain boxed in by Role Play’s predictable, risk-free screenplay. Despite a fun cameo and a handful of semi-rousing action sequences (impressively shot on-location in Berlin), the film can’t escape its severe lack of verve, no matter how many rounds of bullets go flying by.
Though its conceit is stale, Role Play at least wastes no time setting up. It only takes five minutes for the movie to convey its central conflict: Emma is a working mom who’s lying about being a corporate saleswoman when she’s really one of the world’s most adept contract killers, one whose picture has just popped up on the dark web’s most-wanted list. Obviously, this presents a major safety concern for a woman who’s trying to make some Mickey Mouse-eared blueberry pancakes for her beloved tykes. But Emma assumes that she’s got a handle on it, as long as she can keep a low profile and a loaded pistol strapped to her thigh.
Besides, Emma’s got more pertinent fish to fry, like making up for forgetting her and Dave’s anniversary. As an apology, and to spice things up between the couple, Emma suggests they meet at a hotel bar in the city as total strangers. (That “role play” double entendre is working overtime.) Only, when they do, they’re interrupted by a mysterious man named Bob (Bill Nighy), who spends a lengthy time chatting these “strangers” up and making plenty of quips about Emma being the kind of woman “a lot of men would kill for.” Emma knows that her cover is blown. Her head’s got a price on it, and she needs to find a way to take out Bob, flee the country to find the Germany-based adversaries on her tail, and get her family somewhere safe before it’s too late.
There’s more circumstances leading up to Emma’s name appearing on a bounty-hunting list, but these expository details are sprinkled in so sparingly that the ensuing events become both hard to follow and often painfully dull. While the scene between Nighy, Oyelowo, and Cuoco at the bar is droll and chic enough to pass Role Play off as a decent action flick, those thrills don’t last. Once more information about Emma’s past ekes out of the woodwork, the film buckles under their added weight. Screenwriters Andrew Baldwin and Seth W. Owen can’t quite decide where they want the film to go and how intense they want to make it. This tonal inconsistency wears heavily on the movie by its halfway point, and Thomas Vincent’s style-deficient direction doesn’t provide enough supplementary flair to hold interest when things slow down.
There are, however, some occasionally compelling sequences—often aided by the beauty of German landscapes at which they’re shot. Cuoco makes a damn fine effort at trying to keep the suspense up until the next time she gets to go full gunslinger, but those moments are few and far between when they should be the crux of this tale. Otherwise, too much of Role Play feels eerily reminiscent of The Flight Attendant, letting its star skulk around exotic locations with a weapon, on the run from some unnamed force. Some of the score even sounds like it was plucked right out of an episode of that very show, so much so that I found myself doing several double-takes through Role Play’s runtime.
When viewers finally meet who’s been in the way of Emma’s transition from contract killing into quiet motherhood—a crime syndicate leader named Gwen Carver (Connie Nielsen), who resents Emma for finally breaking free from her clutches—it’s already too late to revive our interest. Role Play shoves much of its storytelling into its last act, and by then, this new ripple feels more like a final plea for the audience to stay with it than any sort of shocking narrative reveal. Nielsen and Cuoco have some decently tense chemistry, but Gwen just isn’t ruthless enough to create some real stakes or give the movie any lasting bite. That Role Play is a frankensteined sum of its inspirations is never clearer than here, during a faceoff set in a German forest that smacks of Cate Blanchett and Saoirse Ronan duking it out in the far-better Hanna.
The movie may be a mandatory watch for us Cuocheads, but even the ever-capable Cuoco can’t save it. The film doesn’t spend enough time letting her work through any of Emma’s supposed moral quandaries about the fact that she’s a cold-blooded killer and a loving mom, which—along with more action sequences—could have made this a fun venture. Cuoco’s recent string of streamer-jumping has proven that she’s up to the task of an emotional balancing act. But unlike those other projects, Role Play doesn’t ingratiate itself to its star's strengths. To my shock, it’s no longer enough to slap a wig on a chatterbox’s head and put a gun in her hand. There’s got to be a decent film surrounding all of that, and that’s one role that this movie does not know how to play.
