As its title might suggest, there’s a smug satisfaction and self-assuredness that drives this middling celebrity smile-and-hangout affair. Fortunately, Playing It Cool has an overall lightheartedness to it that keeps the thing from feeling offensively heavy-handed, even though it attempts to use the all-too-familiar convention of being self-aware of its own genre, acknowledging rom-com cliches while simultaneously playing right into those hands for a tired watch.
If you like your romantic entertainment slow-pitched and soft-balled, or really as more of an excuse to have a fun outing with famous friends, you’ll find a playful time here and without having to give up much in return. All others should be able to smell this stinker miles out.
Chris Evans, buzzed hair and Venice Beach cool, stars as our male lead named Me, which should show you right off the bat just how shamelessly self-referential this story intends to get, and which it plays off of for the remainder of the movie.
Me, who spends nearly the entirety of the film providing voice-over narration, is more or less a needy and selfish guy, blaming his hesitations over true love to the abandonment by his mother as a child as the catalyst that keeps his movie-star self from believing in such things with such beautiful women.
Especially because Me proceeds to meet Her (Michelle Monaghan), and sparks fly – or more specifically, CG’d electricity courses through their hands upon touching. Again, it’s small and unexpected instances of fun that give the film its defeating charm.
The laid back Venice Beach cool will certainly distract you from the fact that Playing It Cool is a bargain-bin offering that will only entertain the most forgiving of audiences.
There’s a lot of half-ideas that are jammed into this thing, and not totally insufferable, mostly because Evans and Monaghan are beautiful movie stars with enough easy-going casualness and chemistry between them to keep the thing at least watchable. Me is also a struggling screenwriter, sort of working on a romantic comedy script before he can work on a generically-named “action movie” and spend six weeks in Malaysia, which Me’s sleazy agent (Anthony Mackie) riffs on over how the women are ready for the action, in colorfully crass detail. Not the movie’s most redeeming part.
But Cool‘s real saving grace is its lassoed effort of its cast. Between Evans’ and Monaghan’s googly-eye making is the “comedic relief, “coming from the likes of Topher Grace, Luke Wilson, Anthony Mackie, Martin Starr, Aubrey Plaza, and Philip Baker Hall.
Not to go unmentioned – there are also a solid handful of cut-to scenes, funny asides where Me will, upon listening to any person’s story, or even his own voice-over, envision himself in the lead role of these scenarios, with Her face in the lover’s role: in one scene, he’s in Korean traditional dress, in another he’s an astronaut, even throwing in a graphic novel animated scene for eclectic’s sake. There’s a whiff of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, but even bringing it up as comparison feels cheap and untrue.
If you’re willing to wade through the generic and mediocre storytelling, all you’re going to get is a whiff of another self-referential romantic comedy movie. The laid back Venice Beach cool will certainly distract you from the fact that Playing It Cool is a bargain-bin offering that will only entertain the most forgiving of audiences.
Playing It Cool is in theaters this weekend.
