By the time I was halfway through, the answer had coalesced into an unmistakable, resounding yes. In more than a decade of reviewing films for Paste, I’ve rarely come across anything as vastly irritating and downright embarrassing as Playdate, a film that stars Kevin James and Alan Ritchson as a classic odd couple buddy pairing of awkward dads becoming embroiled in a mystery alongside their even more awkward sons. Is Playdate technically among the worst movies I’ve ever seen, then? Perhaps “worst movies” isn’t quite the right term, given that my passion for schlock and earnest failure has nursed multiple bad movie columns over the years as well. Playdate isn’t that sort of technical marvel of incompetence, even though it’s rough on that front as well; rather, it’s the perfect storm of uncaring, sludgy cynicism that results in yet another formless, tasteless, laugh-less piece of “content” for the world of streaming feature films. So is it the worst? Maybe not, but I’d argue this might very well be the most devoid of value thing I’ve ever watched on the job, which is a momentous statement in its own way. Playdate will shake your faith in the idea of ever popping on a direct-to-streaming original, lest you again end up watching something like this. We’re talking dreck, plain and simple.
🔴For Full .Film. Click Here🔴
At its heart, you might consider Playdate an entry in the “Mom or Dad is a secret badass” genre that can’t seem to stop cropping up in the streaming world, whether we’re talking about Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Spy Kids, or even Netflix’s more recent Back in Action, merged with the “schlubby guy stuck riding along with cool guy” action subgenre. Schlubby guy in question is the windbreaker-clad Brian (Kevin James), who has recently become the stepfather to picked-upon wimp Lucas (Benjamin Pajak). One would think that this would portend a story about Brian attempting to win over the respect of a resistant new stepson, but instead it’s Lucas who is positively fawning in his embrace of the new father figure–he’s literally calling him “Dad” and saying “I love you” on screen before we’ve even learned that Brian is his stepdad, leaving their relationship almost nowhere to go. Cool guy in question, meanwhile, is obviously Reacher star Ritchson’s character Jeff, an absurdly bulging fellow dad that Brian meets while Jeff is engaging in over-the-top combat roughhousing with his seemingly supernaturally strong son, the dead-eyed and laconic CJ (Banks Pierce). Gregarious to the point of seeming insanity, Jeff practically demands that the two pairs engage in an immediate playdate for their sons with these people he’s just met, only for them to all end up on the run when shadowy paramilitary types begin attempting to kill them and capture the oddly nonplussed CJ. The game, what little there is, is afoot.
Playdate thus devolves quickly into a series of chases and conversations as the pair of dads attempt to get to the bottom of what the antagonists want with CJ, as the two kids generally sit quietly in the background of scenes and are occasionally told to pipe down, contributing little if anything to the narrative. It’s meant to be the kind of kid-featuring vehicle to soften the edges of a buff action star in the way that a mid-90s vehicle would have for Arnold Schwarzenegger, or a late 2000s one might have served for Dwayne Johnson or Vin Diesel–any more contemporary reference is strictly forbidden.
But unfortunately the action, in a word, is abysmal–perhaps there’s some quality fight choreography that exists somewhere in the film, but good luck being able to perceive any of it when Playdate is stricken by some of the most egregious shaky-cam action cinematography the genre has seen in the entire post-Bourne era, combined with spastic editing (especially during car chases) that lends any scene involving motion an instantly nauseating overtone. What’s meant to be exciting instead immediately becomes torturous, and not even Ritchson’s Reacher (or the nearly as painful Motor City) experience is tapped in any useful way. Greenfield seems lost in attempting to keep the energy level high, and his primary concern for whatever reason instead becomes stuffing the film with completely contrived, pandering references to other movies, particularly ‘90s fare like Forrest Gump or Reservoir Dogs. He can’t even resist directly featuring clips from his own prior work, dropping in a snippet of The Girl Next Door like he’s fucking Andy Sidaris proudly reflecting on his Bullets, Bombs & Babes series. It’s about as subtle as Hitchcock stunt-casting himself as Norman Bates’ mother would have been.
As a comedy, however, Playdate is even more moribund, focusing itself increasingly around a ceaseless parade of comedy luminary bit players who show up for a minute or two and then waltz out of the film like they’re members of Adam Sandler’s flunky crew collecting a weekend shoot paycheck. Hell, scratch “weekend”–most of what is ultimately provided by performers such as Stephen Root, Paul Walter Hauser, Isla Fischer, Sarah Chalke, or Alan Tudyk (as the ostensible villain, who barely exists) could probably be knocked out in a single afternoon, and none of them are given the chance to flex a single moment of their combined comedy chops. Playdate just drags every one of them down into its singularity of anti-comedy, with its attempts at raunchy jokes in particularly ranking among some of the most lazy and painfully unfunny of their kind since the likes of Movie 43, a comparison I don’t invoke lightly. The film (and James in particular) seems entirely aware of how ineffectively any of its material is landing, subsequently mashing the Potty Mouth Panic Button every few minutes as a pick-me-up, which results in a small child making some kind of quip involving the word “bitch.” Rather than even commit to the idea of being perverse, however, the film then sands off the edges of anything that might be the least bit boundary pushing, and you can ultimately see where some more floridly blue language was presumably removed from the film to avoid an “R” rating, replaced with gratingly clumsy ADR. Playdate is apparently as cowardly as it is clumsy.
No one escapes from this mess looking good, although to his credit, Ritchson is at least giving it a titanic effort, mugging frenziedly for the camera in his portrayal of Jeff as something between an oafish dolt and good-natured ex-soldier himbo, who we know must be an exemplary man because he once refused to follow orders to shoot a child point blank while deployed in the Middle East. Oddly, he has no such qualms in the film’s closing moments, when Playdate commits an off-screen act of violence against children so brazenly shocking and poorly calculated that I almost can’t believe it made the final cut. But that kind of inconsistent, jaw-dropping decision making is par for the course in a film that is endlessly convinced that a muscle-bound guy like Ritchson dancing in the car to classic ‘90s pop, or a TikTok parody called “DikDok,” is the height of comedy gold. It’s only Ritchson’s absurdly handsome, charismatic outline that helps him get away with slightly more here than the sad sack frumpiness of James as he coasts through another passionless, garbled line riding.
The sheer, cumulative ugliness of Playdate, as it careens between sequences of incomprehensible action and dull-as-dirt comedy, works to do nothing so much as corrode the spirit. Every character finds their own way to be irritating, regardless of how much time they have on screen. Grating doesn’t begin to describe it; you’d say that Greenfield’s film has reached rare heights in its capacity for tedium, but it’s more like inconceivable depths. Every negative association someone might have with streaming service “originals” is affirmed as Playdate coalesces into a standard-bearer for the most awful tendencies of our digital era. If only we could dispose of it as Playdate does with a warehouse full of innocents … in a demonstrative fireball, from which none emerge alive.
Director: Luke Greenfield
Writer: Neil Goldman
Stars: Kevin James, Alan Ritchson, Sarah Chalke, Alan Tudyk, Stephen Root, Isla Fisher
Release date: Nov. 12, 2025
Top comments (0)