Playing With Fire (2019) - Movie Review

Over the last few weeks, I’ve covered some films that have gotten a pretty heavy reaction out of yours truly. Such is the nature of the year-end round-up, as catching up with I missed earlier in the year has brought to some truly fantastic films and some real shockers. Part of me is wondering if my verging-on-burnout mindset over this month is artificially heightening my initial reception, like I’ve been giving certain features either too much or too little credit. Well, thankfully we have this film, which is quite bad but it’s not the excruciating variety that I’ve been subjecting myself to of late. Oh, rest assured, it still sucks, but it’s the most inoffensive suckage I’ve reviewed in a while.

The cast seems to consist solely of people who either struggle valiantly against the limpness of the writing, or just those who don’t know any better. I’m a lot kinder to John Cena than I used to be, and while his physical presence and sense of timing does him well here, the malnourished ‘re-adjusting what it means to be a man’ character arc he’s saddled with doesn’t give him much to work with. Him actually doing the ‘You Can’t See Me’ hand gesture didn’t help either. John Leguizamo’s main gimmick is that he keeps misquoting famous people, and Keegan-Michael Key’s main gimmick is remarking the degree of wrongness the quoting turns out. That’s pretty much all they have, and I feel quite bad for Keegan in particular because he is so sincerely trying to work with what he’s got to no avail.

Then there’s the kids… because apparently, we haven’t figured out that the whole ‘take an adult profession and just bring children into it’ formula should’ve been left behind decades ago. The kids themselves are perfectly fine, and it’s nice seeing Brianna Hildebrand try her best as a second-rate Isabella Moner from Instant Family (and that’s not a knock, she does well with a similar character), but they hit a weird point as far as depicting children on-screen.

They definitely feel authentic in that mode, but when it gets to the ‘monkey business’ and the screaming and the pooping, it creates a form of realism that is aggressively difficult to watch. If it weren’t for the fact that I was the only one at the screening I went to, I would’ve just assumed that the screaming kids were in the audience.

As for the story, there really isn’t one to be found here. It’s really just a bunch of improv sessions loosely strung together, with only a couple of actual dramatic moments to do with the kids and their parents, and they’re pretty weak improv sessions at that. If it’s not hyperactive overacting, it’s ridiculously drawn-out, like a comedic set piece solely involving Keegan Michael-Key adjusting a crooked picture frame.

And if it’s not even that good, it’s some of the worst gags I’ve seen all year, like a sequence where the firefighters (sorry, smoke-jumpers) have to change one of the kids’ diapers, because this was apparently written during the mid-80s, or when Keegan suddenly declares “Those aren’t flapjacks; those are distract-jacks!”. It’s like being smacked in the face with a foam baseball bat every ten seconds; it’s unpleasant, but still too lame to be all that painful.

I still maintain that this isn’t entirely terrible, though, and that’s largely down to the main point behind the whole thing: Examining masculinity. Since it’s a family film, it doesn’t really get into the toxic side of things, but it still shows a want to re-assess what it considered ‘manly’. Some of it hits a stupid chord, like how insecure Cena can come across when he talks about how much cooler smoke-jumpers than are simple firefighters, but when put against the very superheroic imagery attributed to the fire rescue scenes and the team at the outpost, it’s at least aiming in the right direction. Hell, in the wake of the bushfire crisis over here in Australia, this seems like one of those films that got released at just the right time. Far as I'm concerned, those guys really are superheroes.

However, just because its heart is in the right place doesn’t mean it isn’t incredibly flawed, and it all comes down to the cultural touchstone that the film keeps referring back to: My Little Pony. Now, as someone who has a few seasons of the show under his belt, and who knows the reality of its fanbase and who wound up gravitating strongest towards it, I can honestly get how that would be the main thematic shorthand for how much the idea of what makes men men has changed in recent years. However, that also kind of flies in the face of how, when you get down to it, MLP is a lot better at balancing message with entertainment value.

This film, on the other hand, just doesn’t have enough strength in either category to really work as well as it might’ve in other hands. The actors are clearly trying, and there’s definitely some good ideas floating around, but the writing lacks enough anchor points and the comedy lacks the consistency to fulfil that potential. Like I said, it’s still a bad movie, but in comparison to some of the other shit I’ve covered recently, it’s at least one of the more harmless bad movies of late.