Playing It Cool comes off as one of those fraudulent
Hollywood rom-coms right from the start. Chris Evans, so good and believable as
Captain America or in a movie like Snowpiercer,
has yet to hit his groove as a romantic lead, and it's not entirely his fault.
He's got charm to spare and works as a regular guy looking for love, but the
screenplay hits on too many clichés to be believable, ironic because Evans'
character warns us about exactly that.
One of those winking "meta"
comedies too clever for its own good, Playing It Cool centers on an unnamed
screenwriter tasked with writing a rom-com by his sexist agent (Evans' Captain
America co-star, Anthony Mackie), with the promise of a lucrative action movie
gig afterwards. There's just one problem, Evans' character has never been in
love because his mother left him as a child and now he's just another guy
afraid of real commitment. If you guessed all of this changes on a dime when he
meets the perfect woman (Michelle Monaghan) then you've won the big prize! The
problem is that she's committed to a boring perfectly
decent but conveniently unavailable boyfriend (Evans' Fantastic Four co-star, Ioan Gruffudd) who obviously
lacks Evans' spark. In fact, when Evans and Monaghan first meet there's a
literal flash of electricity.
Visual touches like that go a long way in
making the film somewhat enjoyable for a time. Originally described back when
it was titled A Many
Splintered Thing as a
whimsical cross between Amelie and (500) Days of Summer, there are
some fun fantasy elements that first-time director Justin Reardon plays with.
When Evans' character dreams of a romantic scenario, or even just hears of one
from somebody else, he imagines himself as the lead and these scenes are
realized as live-action or animated fairy tales.
But the film soon falls back on more
familiar plot elements while exploring whether men and women can really just be
friends. He's aggressive in pursuit, she's reluctant; he can't handle being in
the "friend zone", she wants to have her cake and eat it too, yadda
yadda yadda. This story was done more honestly last year in The F Word, and by many other
films before that. There's an easy chemistry between Evans and Monaghan,
but the female perspective is largely ignored by screenwriters Chris
Shafer and Paul Vickner, who also wrote Evans' directorial debut, Before We Go.
Through a ton of overdone, overly familiar speeches about love we know why
Evans' character wants her but nothing about what she wants, and of course
she's totally weak-kneed to his charms.
If there's a saving grace it's the
talented cast that makes up the screenwriter's closest friends, who admittedly
are still a bunch of genre stereotypes. Aubrey Plaza is the scorned girl who
secretly pines for Evans, Topher Grace (another Marvel alum) is the friend who
believes in the pure power of love, while Luke Wilson and Martin Starr are the
slobs who offer all the worst advice. They're still more entertaining than the
central romance which has initial spark but, like a bad relationship, quickly
fizzles out.
Evans has long lamented that his fans only
seek out his Marvel work while his indie projects are largely ignored. Playing It Cool isn't likely to change that,
unfortunately. Despite some enjoyable visual cues, it's neither witty nor
perceptive enough to stand apart from better movies that have tread the same
romantic territory.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
