Playdate but not Play Dirty

One of the easiest annual methods of goosing my movie count is to watch everything the streamers offer me. In fact, depending on how you want to stretch your definition of what counts as a movie -- there are a lot of quickie Netflix documentaries out there -- I could probably watch a similar number of movies to the total amount I rank each year, drawing only from Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Stan. It would be a pretty sad year, though.

Because "free" and "easy to access" are both powerful motivators to me when watching movies, it takes will power not to watch all of these movies. But it's will power I take pride in exercising. 

And the easiest place to cut fat, in terms of return on the time I'm investing watching these movies, is with buddy action comedies. The streamers are lousy with those at the moment, probably beause they continue to make the algorithm happy.

But you can't skip all the buddy action comedies. So which do you watch and which don't you watch?

One easy opt-in is how early it comes out in the year. At the start of the year, I'm desperate for new content as long as it has that year's release date on it. In fact, the very first movie I watched in 2025 -- that counted for 2025, I should say -- was the Jamie Foxx-Cameron Diaz buddy action comedy Back in Action.

Had Back in Action come out in September, I might have skipped it. Though I find both Foxx and Diaz appealing, so it might have made the cut. 

But January? To get my 2025 list started? It was a no doubter.

A buddy action comedy released later in the year, when I have plenty to choose from, really has to hit all of my personal four quadrants in order to make it before my eyeballs. (I don't actually have a "personal four quadrants," I'm just trying to repurpose some industryspeak to make my point.) So last year, when the Mark Wahlberg-Halle Berry buddy action comedy The Union came out on August 16th, it didn't stand much of a chance. 

That said, my feelings toward the Foxx-Diaz duo and the Wahlberg-Berry duo are pretty similiar, so maybe The Union makes a real-life test case for the hypothetical later releasing of Back in Action. Anyway, yeah, I skipped The Union. And now that I didn't see it in the year it came out, where it at least had the justification of being rankings fodder, there's probably little reason for me to ever see it. 

But release date is not the only factor here. I'm also looking at whether the premise of these movies has a "certain something" that potentially makes them stand out from the pack. And it doesn't take a lot, just a whiff of what looks like inspiration. Which brings us to another Mark Wahlberg vehicle, which I am also skipping.

I've had the ability to watch Amazon Prime's Play Dirty for the entire time I've been back from Europe, as it was released only a few days before our trip ended. But I am snubbing it and expect to continue snubbing it, unless I find myself in some weird circumstance where it's the only thing available to me.

Why? Well perhaps it's this logline, courtesy of IMDB:

"A ruthless thief and his expert crew stumble onto the heist of a lifetime."

Yawn. Boring. 

Meanwhile, a movie with a similar title and similar prospects of actually being good was released six weeks later into the year, also on Amazon Prime, meaning it was probably six weeks less likely for me to actually watch. Though watch Playdate I did this past weekend, on the second day of its availability, perhaps due to this logline, also courtesy of IMDB:

"Brian has just been fired from his job. He becomes a stay-at-home dad. He accepts a playdate invitation from another stay-at-home dad who turns out to be a loose cannon."

Although the actual writing in that logline leaves something to be desired -- and to be honest, I've only just now read it for the first time -- it does point to the fact that there's a sort of interesting idea here. The buddy action comedy stuff will grow out of a playdate gone pear-shaped, which is at least not a scenario I've ever seen in a movie, and has the potential to be funny. 

Now I should note that Kevin James and Alan Ritchson, the stars of Playdate, have a significant disadvantage next to Wahlberg and Lakeith Stanfield, the latter of whom I particularly like. If I were going only on the extent to which I find the stars compelling, Play Dirty would easily beat out Playdate. But the premise of one has that "certain something" while the premise of the other makes me yawn, so that is the deciding factor in this case. (And I've already gotten plenty of Lakeith Stanfield, who appears in both Roofman and Die My Love, in 2025.) 

While we're on the topic of James, I'm actually putting his other 2025 film in the "skip" category, though I don't know if it profiles as a buddy action comedy in the same way. It certainly profiles as streamer fodder that the algorithm has willed into existence. That film is Guns Up, which co-stars Christina Ricci, though it doesn't sound like a buddy action comedy in this case:

"On the brink of leaving 'The Family,' a mob henchman's final job goes off the rails. With the clock ticking, the ex-cop has one night to get his unsuspecting family out of the city before he gets snuffed out."

Yawn. Boring.

And that one's not even grammatically correct. The mob henchman's final job is on the bring of leaving The Family?

Unfortunately, the Playdate vs. Play Dirty choice, assuming the artificial scenario that I could choose only one of them, was made poorly. I can't comment on Play Dirty of course, but I can tell you that I thought Playdate was terrible, even though Ritchson tried pretty hard to make it better than that. James did not try very hard. 

But anyone who thinks there won't be enough buddy action comedies that debuted on streamers in my 2025 rankings, don't you worry your pretty little head. In addition to Back in Action and Playdate, we have:

• Heads of State, starring John Cena and Idris Elba, which debuted on Amazon Prime on July 2nd
• The Pickup, starring Eddie Murphy and Pete Davidson, which debuted on Amazon Prime on August 6th
• It would have been nice if there were a third one, but I guess that's it

Actually there is one other film worth mentioning, but it breaks the mold in one important way: There are three buddies instead of two, which takes it out of the realm of "buddy action comedy" as I've been defining it.

The best one of these movies -- and the only one that is currently in my top 40 movies of the year -- is called Deep Cover, and it stars the trio of Orlando Bloom, Bryce Dallas Howard and Nick Mohammed, the latter of whom you might know from Ted Lasso. This is also an Amazon Prime special, having debuted on June 12th, meaning that the only two movies in this whole piece that came from Netflix were The Union and Back in Action. 

Deep Cover definitely has the most promising of these loglines:

"Three improv actors are asked to go undercover by the police in London's criminal underworld."

See? Good ideas are not totally dead after all. 

Orlando Bloom's still working, just not in Jurassic World

When I saw the character Martin Krebs appear on screen in Jurassic World: Rebirth (review here), I thought "Boy is it nice to see Orlando Bloom on screen again!"

I was never a huge Bloom fan, but I always thought it was strange, and a little unwarranted, that he was unceremoniously ushered out of the spotlight during what should have been the prime of his career. I don't even remember the reason for it. Was he cancelled? Not that I recall. Did he stop being good? Not that I recall there either. 

The guy is only just now 48 years old. It's not like he hasn't been working, it's just that the projects have been almost exclusively what we would have once called "straight to video."

I mean, this was a guy who appeared in two of the iconic trilogies of the early 21st century, those being Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean. At one point, he was among the highest grossing actors of all time in terms of the money made by his movies. Both of those trilogies had other future installments, and Bloom appeared in some of those too.

Then sometime around the end of the Hobbit trilogy, which is now 11 years ago, he just stopped appearing in high-profile movies, with only his appearance in 2017's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales as a reprieve from that. But I don't even think that was a lead role, if memory serves. I believe it was a cameo.

The only problem with all these fond recollections of Orlando Bloom's career is that Jurassic World's Martin Krebs is not actually played by Orlando Bloom. He's played by Rupert Friend, which I didn't realize until the closing credits of Jurassic World: Rebirth. 

Easy mistake to make. I knew the internet would have a good picture of them side by side, so here it is:

Imagine my surprise, then, when the very next movie I would watch would actually feature Orlando Bloom.

That's Deep Cover, a new Amazon Prime movie I first clocked a few weeks back when it was being advertised as coming soon. I noticed Bryce Dallas Howard in it (more on her in a moment) but I didn't pay enough attention to identify her co-stars at the time.

But when Wednesday night rolled around, after I'd seen Jurassic World on Tuesday, that was the logical next movie up for me, and there was Orlando Bloom in the flesh. 

And killing it, to be honest, making me wonder again where he's been all our lives.

The movie has a pretty delightful premise, even if that premise comes to strain credibility a bit. What is the biggest problem faced by undercover cops who are trying to infiltrate a criminal organization? It's being able to stay in character the whole time, adapt to any changes, and supply credible information about their character at a moment's notice, in the highest stakes situations where a misstep could get them killed. There was a whole speech about it in Reservoir Dogs. 

Who best to do this sort of thing, then? How about improv comedians?

Bloom's character is actually coming in to improv as a desperate attempt to keep his career afloat. He envisions himself more as a serious actor, just a serious actor who has been failing to get any work outside of commercials. This leads to much hilarity, especially the way Bloom plays him: deep into the method and forever blind to his own practical limitations as a person who is not actually a gangster.

The whole movie works well overall, with an enjoyable third lead performance by Nick Mohammed of Ted Lasso fame, as the unconfident, stammering member of the trio most likely to lose face and get them killed. 

But let's get to that second lead: Bryce Dallas Howard. Who has also been on my mind this past week.

You may recall that I mentioned Howard also in connection with Jurassic World: Rebirth, when I was contrasting her with Scarlett Johansson in this post, since Johansson was effectively inheriting the lead female role from Howard in the Jurassic movies. I said I liked both actresses but that I respected Johansson while I did not particularly respect Howard. 

Well, lo and behold, Howard reminded me in Deep Cover that I respect her pretty well, too, and she's a lot more than just Ron's daughter. Perhaps I always knew that, but my goal in that post was to boost Johansson, so I had to have a straw man against whom to compare her. 

It's funny that Johansson and Friend would have scenes of pairing up with each other in Jurassic World and Howard and Bloom would have scenes of pairing up with each other in Deep Cover, kind of like alternate universe doppelgangers. 

Oh but we're not done with the actors in Deep Cover in terms of funny proximal viewings.

Two movies before I saw Deep Cover, I saw Heads of State. These are both genre movies, effectively both action comedies, released on Amazon Prime, and they both feature Paddy Considine in a villainous role. That may be the actor's specialty these days, but two in the same week underscored just how much that's the case. 

But wait there's one more, and this is entirely within Deep Cover, and it was surely intentional by the filmmakers. 

I mentioned Bloom's history in the Lord of the Rings movies. You know who else was also in those movies, at least the first one?

Sean Bean, who appears in Deep Cover as their liaison within the police force. 

If I don't use the word "coincidences," does this still count as another post about coincidences? (Oops, I just did.)