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Role Play is a highly-improbable comedy about a Suzie Homemaker-type – Kaley Cuoco (A Million Ways To Die In The West) as Emma Brackett – who’s kept a long-term secret from her husband, Dave (David Oyelowo – See How They Run), about being an assassin.
It’s not exactly an original concept, as anyone who’s seen True Lies will attest to, but then we never did get a sequel to that, since James Cameron made Titanic, and then moved on to 39 Avatar movies.
For Dave, he thinks their marriage is simply on the rocks, because she missed an anniversary, so buys her a nurse’s outfitfor some ‘role play’, leading to a date night to rekindle the spark. However, upon meeting Bob (Bill Nighy as Bill Nighy), who encounters the pair in the hotel, it transpires they both know who each other is, leading to a situation where Bob’s constant Nighy-style sniggering might see him sniggering on the other side of his face.
As you’d expect, Dave ends up massively confused about how he’s effectively been lied to by his wife of many years, similar to how the viewer is wondering if this is really the best script anyone could come up with.
That’s because with Kaley kicking bottom, this gives us a taster of what a potential Helen Tasker would’ve done (even though there was a 2023 series based on Cameron’s movie, which completely bypassed me – and I can see from the IMDB ratings that it didn’t exactly set the world on fire), but what we’re left with – over the course of 100 minutes – is what feels like a mediocre double-episode pilot for a series, rather than a complete feature film.
Thanks to our friends at Prime Video for the screener prior to broadcast.
Role Play is on Prime Video from today, but the film isn’t yet available to pre-order on Blu-ray or DVD.
Detailed specs:
Cert: 
Running time: 100 minutes
Release date: January 12th 2024
Studio: Prime Video
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1
Rating: 4/10
Director: Thomas Vincent
Producers: Kaley Cuoco, Alex Heineman, Andrew Rona
Screenplay: Seth Owen
Music: Rael Jones
Cast:
Emma Brackett: Kaley Cuoco
Dave Brackett: David Oyelowo
Bob Kellerman: Bill Nighy
Gwen Carver: Connie Nielsen
Raj: Rudi Dharmalingam
Caroline Brackett: Lucia Aliu
Wyatt Brackett: Regan Bryan-Gudgeon
Toby Berman: Simon Delaney
Karen Shah: Sonita Henry
Ji: Jade Dregorius
Salas: Julia Schunevitsch
Molly: Stephanie Levi-John
Carlo: Steffen Jung
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.