Playing It Cool

Only the really strong cast, including great chemistry between the leads, keeps "Playing It Cool" from totally derailing.

Screenwriters Chris Shafer and Paul Vicknair's script feels like a first draft that was written in one night as they got pumped up on Red Bull and speed-watched Netflix.

You know you're in trouble when almost every character is given a name except the two leads.

Proceeding with a strained quirkiness that infects much more than the names of its main characters, this first feature by Justin Reardon is a paean to the kind of narcissism that sucks the air out of every scene.

As characters endlessly digress on the differences between rom-coms and real life, the film evinces a schizophrenic relationship with its own inside-baseball cynicism.

There's nothing clever or subversive about Playing It Cool, which makes the film's overt self-satisfaction exponentially more infuriating.

'Playing it Cool' is disappointing not because it's unlike any other romantic comedy, but because it tries not to be one and fails spectacularly. [Full review in Spanish]

I have uncontrollable hatred for this movie. I hate it with the fire of a thousand suns. It's the dumbest movie I've seen in recent memory.

Worst of all, though, is its wholesale waste of an insanely talented cast - and not just Evans and Monaghan... I enjoy every last one of them, but not like this. Dear god, not like this.

Far from playing it cool, the filmmakers are trying way too hard to look cool, and so they achieve the opposite.