As an arts critic, sometimes you have to fall on a grenade. There are titles like Playdate that force us to question our chosen profession, pondering why we’d willingly subject ourselves to such mind-rotting Hollywood gruel. Luke Greenfield’s atomically awful action-comedy may joke about waterboarding, but the true torture is sitting through this embarrassing, humorless wart on Prime Video’s streaming catalog. It’s not even 90 minutes before credits, yet in the moment threatens to become a Sisyphean purgatory with no escape.
In this terrible film, Kevin James stars as Brian Jennings, a windbreaker-wearing manly man (or so he projects), recently fired from his forensic auditing gig. Brian’s wife, Emily (Sarah Chalke), suggests that he try being a stay-at-home stepdad to connect with her bullied, dance-loving son Lucas (Benjamin Pajak). Brian tries to toss the ol’ pigskin with Lucas at the park, but it’s not the boy’s forte. Enter ex-soldier Jeff Eamon (Alan Ritchson), the G.I. Joe-looking dad to the energetically feral CJ (Banks Pierce), who thinks he and Brian should be best friends. On the spot, they organize a playdate and hop in Jeff’s van—which is when the chaos begins.
If this were a ’90s comedy, there might still be a twinkle of ingenuity here, but the execution is barely on par with a last-minute MADtv sketch. Longtime sitcom writer Neil Goldman’s work on Family Guy, Scrubs, and Community is nowhere to be found in the dry-as-a-desert Playdate. The odd couple of James and Ritchson sounds fine on paper—King Of Queens meets Blue Mountain State—but at no point in James’ performance does he indicate that he would like to be anywhere near the set. The comedian appears to be held at gunpoint, stammering through unfunny lines with the same Eeyore-like expression in every scene. But it’s not like Ritchson fares any better, reduced to the recurring gag of “doofus brute beats up children” while occasionally saddled with off-key himbo humor.
As for the action beats, don’t expect Reacher to appear. Let’s say Jeff isn’t telling the whole truth; mercenaries are on his tail, but they aren’t Jason Bourne. Ritchson punches nameless goons in a playplace changing room, but there’s no real excitement to the choreography. Greenfield’s film is always mugging for laughs that don’t exist, at least, when it’s not a Honda Odyssey commercial (this is the only reason Isla Fisher’s playground “Mama Mafia” leader finds her way on screen).
Playdate stifles the talents of not only James and Ritchson, or the underused Fisher, but of the other talented funnymen who appear as favors in bit parts. Paul Walter Hauser gets the closest to eliciting a smile with his role’s scripted drek. Stephen Root plays Jeff’s estranged lothario father, but the irresponsible old man gag grows tiresome before Root even attempts to land his first punchline. Then there’s Alan Tudyk, playing the film’s antagonist Simon Maddox, who strangely feels more like a cameo than a final boss to defeat. Perhaps there was more to the flimsy narrative left on the editing bay’s floor, where there might have been actual attempts to develop any sense of an intriguing story. As it stands, Playdate is like an action-comedy subgenre speedrun that discards basic tenets of pacing and structure. The formula is wrong, yet barrel forward it must.
Even worse, it seems Greenfield built his ill-constructed film with spare parts. The overuse of ADR is wildly uneven, but at least these aural blemishes happen while the actors’ mouths are hidden. Yet, in another scene where Ritchson repeats an insult, the filmmakers apparently wanted to dub a new line in post-production despite his face being fully in frame, leading to some of the ugliest mouth-reworking effects (that still doesn’t match the audio) committed to screen. It’s atrocious. Whether it’s AI-generated or not, it’s the pinnacle of how unnatural and garish this technique can look. Perhaps nobody involved cares, because streaming films are now simply intended to be “content” played in the background of people’s lives? Whatever the reasoning, the moment conveys how little the filmmakers and creative team respect their audience, their craft, and themselves.
There’s nothing here to defend. Playdate substantiates every predetermined and conspiratorial stereotype about streaming titles being inherently “lesser” than theatrical releases. Greenfield will have audiences begging for even a flash of the far superior laughs he achieved in…The Animal or Let’s Be Cops. When people complain about the death of mainstream comedies, it’s bottomfeeding films like Playdate that are the genre’s executioner. No energy, no wit, just a tasteless and tacky sequence of events that barely manages to clear the bar for what’s still considered a movie.
Director: Luke Greenfield
Writer: Neil Goldman
Starring: Kevin James, Alan Ritchson, Sarah Chalke, Alan Tudyk, Stephen Root, Isla Fisher
Release Date: November 12, 2025 (Amazon Prime Video)
