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"See you in a beer commercial!”
In Short
When the lead actor of a film is quoted in a newspaper describing the
project by saying "I knew it would be complete rubbish and I sincerely
hope no one ever sees it," you just know that the end result is going to
be a steaming pile the likes of which would scare even the most stalwart
of litter box attendants. Such is the case with Playmaker, an odd bit of
mystery/suspense (badly mis-marked as an "erotic thriller") that comes
across as jumbled at best and badly incoherent the rest of the time.
Unless you happen to have a fetish for one of the cast members or a really
bad case of insomnia and absolutely nothing better to do (including
flossing), there's really not much about this flick to recommend it to
anyone.
Synopsis
Jamie Harris (Jennifer Rubin, Amazons & Gladiators) is a down-on-her-luck,
alcoholic, no-name actress whose career highlight thus far has been
playing a comatose hospital patient for the past three months on a soap
opera. She's afraid that she'll never get anywhere, and spends her
evenings drowning her sorrows at the local watering hole, where she's
friends with the bartender, Eddie (John Getz, Requiem For A Dream). After
watching Jamie lament yet again over a bottle of booze, Eddie suggests
that perhaps she might benefit from the advice of an acting coach. In
fact, there used to be another struggling actress who used to come to the
bar whose career suddenly skyrocketed after she started going to one coach
in particular whose name Eddie happens to know, a certain Ross Talbert
(whom we later meet in the form of Colin Firth, Conspiracy). Figuring that
she has nothing to lose aside from $5000 worth of coaching fees, Jamie
decides to give it a try. However, she'll soon discover that Talbert's
teaching methods are more than just a bit unorthodox, and there's far more
to what's happening than meets the eye, something that promises to be
quite deadly…
In Detail
Oh, where to begin with this hour and a half's worth of cinematic train
wreck.
Just about every aspect of Playmaker is a disaster, from the ludicrous
script to the poor direction to the awful casting. When the lead actor
himself is declaring that it's "a silly story" and that his primary
motivation for being involved was that it was "a three week job and it
paid extremely well" and just happened to be filming in the same city
where his son was at the time, that's not exactly a ringing endorsement,
and after watching this flick, it's easy to see why the man would prefer
to distance himself from this celluloid lutefisk factory. There's no
getting around the fact that Playmaker is just plain bad.
Beginning with the story first, it just doesn't make any sense, in almost
every way possible. It starts off plainly enough with the insecure drunk
actress, lamenting her languid career and lack of talent, who suddenly
gets handed an opportunity to study with this fabulous acting coach. Okay,
fine. Then the audience sees that this coach is a little on the eccentric
side, bordering on the mildly insane with his screaming and microphone
tricks and flashing cameras at the dinner table and whatnot. Still okay.
And then the insanity turns to stupidity, as Jamie's already weak
character does an inexplicable one-eighty and goes a little nutbar
herself, followed quickly by what looks to be a startling final revelation
scene....a scene that occurs barely halfway into the movie's posted runtime.
This is really starting to feel wrong, and when something that looks and
feels like a complete ending occurs with more than a half hour of screen
time left to go....Uh-oh....What follows from that point on is something
utterly bizarre and out of place that just does not fit what went on
before at all, feeling tacked on, forced, and beyond hokey. All of the
characters are essentially rewritten, events occur that make no sense and
simply do not gel with what has already happened on screen, and quite
frankly, the overall quality of the writing, which was already bad, gets
even worse. True, one would be hard pressed to guess the ending to this
flick in advance, but when it comes down to that point, so what? A
surprise ending that makes no sense is no asset to the picture, and by the
time the credits are ready to roll, the story has switched gears so hard
that the audience has gotten whiplash and is simply beyond caring. To
fully articulate everything that is wrong with what happens to the
characters here would be to spoil too much of the plot (such as it is);
however, what I will say is that both leads as they appear in the final
third of the film do not gel at all with what happens in the first.
By and large, the direction is too poor to do the screenplay any favors.
Director Yuri Zeltser (Eye of the Storm) seems incapable of creating even
the slightest amount of tension and suspense, even when the characters on
screen literally have guns pointed at them. All of the supposed tension in
Playmaker is artificial and forced; at no time is there ever a real
feeling of suspense or thrill, not even once. Zeltser tries to fake it
with some artsy camera work (and to his credit there are one or two clever
moments - a reflection in a coffee cup, for example - but nothing at any
time that would make this film look or feel like an actual "thriller"),
but ends up failing completely at every turn. One scene in particular
involving the alcoholic Jamie chasing after a wine bottle in a wheelchair
that ends up with her knocking the bottle over and licking up the puddle
of wine from the floor is just plain embarrassing, and more than almost
any other single moment speaks to the cheesiness of this movie. This
attempt at "faking it" with the tension is augmented by an overblown score
by Mark Snow (yes, the guy from "The X-Files"), which commits the horrible
mistake time and time again of bringing up heavy, ominous musical cues
that lead into absolutely nothing, constantly setting up the audience for
thrills that never arrive, thus bringing about the exact opposite effect
of aggravation and boredom instead. Combine that with Zeltser's blatant
telegraphing of any allegedly "suspenseful surprise" events long in
advance of when they actually are going to happen, and the disaster is
complete.
Then there's the absurd labeling of Playmaker as "an erotic thriller".
Whoever decided this was an appropriate categorization must have been
incredibly hard up at the time, because this flick is neither erotic nor
thrilling. The lacks of thrills have already been covered;
having a few statically presented butt shots of
Colin Firth in the shower (and a quick
forward shot of him stepping out that
doesn't quite reveal anything), one dishwater-dull topless
scene of Jennifer Rubin lying on her back, an almost comically ludicrous
faux-sex scene shot through thick glass block that involves her screaming
a lot while the audience watches two vague flesh-colored blobs, and a
suggestion of off-camera oral sex hardly put this at or anywhere near the
level of Basic Instinct or Jade (or even The Specialist, for that matter,
and that's not exactly an "erotic thriller", either). Someone in marketing
was reaching just a bit too far trying to peg such a label on Playmaker.
With regard to the film's casting, it's just wrong, all the way across the
board, though at different levels. Granted, on the one hand, Jennifer
Rubin has the initial concept of Jamie the untalented actress whose most
convincing role is playing a character who's brain dead down pat, but for
everything that follows, it's hard to escape the fact that she makes the
character so damn annoying. Who cares if she's in mortal danger? After
fifteen minutes of watching Rubin whine, the viewers are ready to pay
someone to kill her themselves. As the story progresses, Rubin falls more
and more out of her depth (she is no match for her costar),
and by the final scenes, she's not only out of her depth, but so utterly
awful that Jamie's solution of drinking heavily in response to any given
situation doesn't seem like such a bad way to go. Someone the likes of
Shannon Tweed or Joan Severance would have made for far more appropriate
casting for this role; Jennifer Rubin just can't hack it here.
I'm not even going to get into Jeff Perry (Body of Evidence) as Jamie's
agent; if I start going there, I'll have to start drinking.
On the other side of the coin, there's Colin Firth, for whom the
question could appropriately be asked: what the bloody hell is he doing in
this godawful flick? Firth is dreadfully miscast in the lead role for this
film – mainly because it's far beneath the level of his talent – and he
knows it, but then again, he's already explained that he took the part
essentially because he was in the neighborhood and it was easy money on a
short schedule. It's obvious that Firth is suffering as an artist throughout the picture,
forced to dumb down the role to the level that the screenplay and the director demand. Even so, however, it is Firth alone
who manages at certain points to keep Playmaker watch able in spite of the best efforts of those around him to
consign it to the pits of eternal drek. Perhaps the best example is
the garbage disposal scene, where he manages to hold interest and create
some form of tension through sheer force of will even though the director
is at the same time doing his damnedest to kill any suspense with a series
of dull and ill-conceived camera cuts that make a similar scene in
Halloween H20: 20 Years Later look like art. Things only go downhill from
there. Firth does the best job possible with the
material presented to him, and it is essentially his effort alone that
keeps this flick's rating out of the basement, but there's only so much
the man can do. What a relief it must have been to do "Pride &
Prejudice" a year later and leave crud like this behind him for good.
One final point has to be made with regard to the make up, etc. as applied
to the two leads. As if the character of Jamie and the performance
involved weren't distractingly annoying enough, what is with the godawful
pageboy haircut they give her? (Is that supposed to add to the film's
"erotic" element, pray tell?) And why, oh why, must poor Colin Firth be
made up to look like an adult version of Buffy and Jody from "A Family
Affair"? Isn't he suffering enough here already without having to look
like he was raised by Mr. French?
In the end, there's just no getting around it: Playmaker is, indeed,
"complete rubbish", as its own lead actor so eloquently puts it. However,
unlike Mr. Firth, I encourage others to see it, just to spread the
suffering around. Just realize in advance that this movie is neither
erotic nor thrilling (unless a couple quick shots
of Colin Firth's butt really get you going), and that with
the exception of watching the lead actor suffer through a part farther
beneath him than the Marianas Trench, there is pretty much nothing
worthwhile going on with this meandering, nonsensical movie, and that once
the ending rolls around, you may be suddenly overcome with the unbearable
urge to slap somebody. |
