I actually emailed Lainey about Playing It Cool (formerly known as A Many Splintered Thing) a few months ago when the official synopsis came out, because this is one of the most amazing synopses I’ve seen in recent memory. Here it is:
“The story of a young man disillusioned by love who meets a breathtaking young woman at a charity dinner by pretending to be a philanthropist. Turns out that she's engaged to a guy who doesn't like her going on dates. Challenged by the chase, and egged on by his eclectic friends, he feigns a platonic relationship in order to keep seeing her as he tries to conquer her heart.”
She’s engaged to a guy who doesn’t like his fiancée going on dates! Haha! And the hero of the story is a dude who continues to meet with this woman under false pretenses so that he can sleep with her! Hijinks! This February, it’s Date Rape: The Movie!
To be fair, the trailer doesn’t play into the “false pretenses” angle. I really hope that the synopsis is just bad copy and there is not at any point a conversation in which a man tells someone else that he intends to spend time with an engaged woman, pretending to be her friend so that he can bang her. Because if that scene is in the movie and the immediate response of the friend isn’t “Whoa, what the f*ck, don’t do that, that’s creepy and awful and something sociopaths do,” we’re going to be in for a bad time.
The trailer makes How to Friendzone a Guy and be Murdered in 10 Days look harmless and cliché and sappy, while the synopsis makes it sound like a sociopath’s wet dream. Either way, it doesn’t look very good (who wants to lay odds on a January 2015 release?). But at least, if nothing else, it will bring us more Anthony Mackie + Chris Evans magic at the press junket.
Attached – Evans at TIFF for Before We Go on Friday
