‘Role Play’ Review: Kaley Cuoco Plays a Suburban Mom Moonlighting as a Global Assassin in Amazon’s Diverting Lark
During the Cold War, we had “I Married a Communist” and “I Married a Monster From Outer Space” — two predicaments that the era’s paranoias rendered basically the same thing. In recent years, however, a more common screen fantasy might be summarized as “Whoops, My Significant Other Turns Out to Be an International Spy/Assassin.” There have been numerous efforts in that vein, of variably intentional absurdity. Now there’s “Role Play,” which by their standards doesn’t seem particularly outlandish for offering “The Big Bang Theory’s” Kaley Cuoco as a globetrotting killer cloaked in the normie guise of suburban mom.
This smaller-scaled, gender-flipped spin on the “True Lies” conceit, however, gets most of its charm and humor from David Oyelowo, playing the Jamie Lee Curtis role of the solidly middlebrow spouse flummoxed at finding themselves married to a lethal weapon. Revealing hitherto underexposed comic chops, he elevates a slick contrivance that disappoints a bit by turning into a middling action thriller rather than heightening its antic potential.
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Nonetheless, French director Thomas Vincent’s multinational co-production remains a fun if derivative diversion throughout. It premieres via Prime Video on Jan. 12, the same day Oyelowo hits theaters as John the Baptist in “The Book of Clarence.”
Just in time for chicken dinner on the grill, Emma Brackett (Cuoco) returns to her middle-class New Jersey home, shared with adoring Dave (Oyelowo), plus their kids, Caroline (Lucia Aliu) and Wyatt (Regan Bryan-Gudgeon). Hubby is fine being spared the boring details of her alleged corporate business conference in Nebraska — which makes life easy, because that is not at all what she was away doing.
In reality, Emma (or whatever her name really is) just got back from neatly dispatching some schmoe in Buenos Aires. She’s a contract killer who can’t even claim the moral justification of eliminating “bad guys” — this latest mark was a local union leader. There is a bounty on her head, yet so far she’s managed to stay under-radar when off the job, and invisible (due to disguises and other tactics) while on it. At the moment, her biggest worry is that she completely forgot her own wedding anniversary.
To make up for that oversight, she proposes a Manhattan date night, additionally spiced by the couple role-playing as “two strangers meeting in a bar.” But while Dave gets held up in traffic, she’s approached in the chosen hotel watering hole by a flirtatious windy bore (Bill Nighy). This encounter turns out less harmless and a lot less boring than it initially appears, however, ultimately leaving a corpse behind. Its discovery the next morning blows Emma’s cover, leaving her scrambling to meet with unamused handler Raj (Rudi Dharmalingam) on yet another last-minute “business trip.”
Dave is still in the dark about his wife’s true profession. But not for long, as authorities soon haul him in for questioning — the moment when it sinks in that the little missus may truly be a “cool-blooded murderer” provokes a double-take from Oyelowo that is probably this film’s highlight. Among those authorities are a purported Federal Special Agent (Connie Nielsen) who turns out to have a long, complicated history with our heroine. When Dave flies to Berlin in pursuit of his fugitive spouse, he inadvertently leads hostile forces straight to her, and things adopt a somewhat more sober life-or-death tenor in the last half hour.
Cuoco, a producer here, mutes her own familiar comedic strengths to play a modified “La Femme Nikita” type, letting her co-star get the laughs. But she retains a slightly goofy, girl-next-door quality, so we never quite buy Emma as some sort of deadly ninja molded by diabolical minders she can’t fully escape.
Luckily, “Role Play” is handled lightly enough by Vincent’s direction and Seth Owen’s script that we never feel the need to take it very seriously. Which is fortunate, because otherwise we’d have to ponder why we’re rooting for an amorally ruthless hitwoman anyway. (That quandary gets evaded in part by avoiding graphic violence, despite a fairly high body count.)
That said, it’s a small letdown that the later progress replaces earlier tongue-in-cheek buoyancy with just-OK action suspense. The players are deft enough that a little more wit in the writing would have surely been well-served. (Nighy in particular makes much of relatively little.) And while briskly handled, none of the ideas here are fresh enough for “Role Play” to score points on narrative or character unpredictability.
Yet it’s a good-enough time, attractively produced, able to get by on sheer amiability when Dave — in a moment of emergency marital analysis — encapsulates these 101 minutes all too succinctly with “I love you and I love our family but killing is bad.”
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