Players

Directed by Trish Sie, Players follows best friends Mack (Gina Rodriguez) and Adam (Damon Wayans Jr.) as they spend their off-hours cooking up various schemes designed to land the opposite sex in bed. It’s a romcom-friendly premise that’s employed to passable yet entirely forgettable effect by Sie, as the filmmaker, armed with Whit Anderson’s screenplay, delivers a briskly-paced endeavor that remains pitched at the level of a contemporary one-camera sitcom from start to finish – with the insubstantial atmosphere perpetuated by Sie’s styleless visuals and an emphasis on generic jokes and set-pieces. There’s little doubt, then, that Players benefits substantially from the charming efforts of stars Rodriguez and Wayans Jr., with the performers’ affable, amiable work going a long way towards elevating the proceedings on a recurring basis. (And it’s worth noting, too, that Sie has admittedly punctuated the narrative with a small handful of laugh-out-loud funny bits of comedy.) By the time the satisfying (albeit entirely predictable) finale rolls around, Players has cemented its place as a decent-enough romance that passes the time in as harmless a manner as one could possibly envision.

**1/2 out of ****