Who’s the target? What’s the play?
Mack’s entire social existence boils down to these two questions. Who is she trying to hook up with, and how is she going to accomplish that. And she’ll do most anything to make the play successful: Tell the most outrageous lie, concoct the most impressive story, act out the most alluring skit.
But it’s not just her, it’s her three best friends—Adam, Brannagan and Little—too. Because even if she doesn’t wind up between the sheets with someone, that doesn’t mean one of them can’t.
However, that all changes when Mack meets Nick. Nick is a British war correspondent. He has a framed picture of himself with his parents in his living room. He owns matching dishes. And last year, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Mack doesn’t just want a one-night stand with Nick. She wants a drawer in his dresser. She wants a real, grown-up relationship.
But as Mack soon learns, relationships aren’t built on lies told to impress a potential paramour. They’re built on trust and honesty. And that can be a bit tricky to accomplish since she’s never played for keeps.
Mack’s quest to become Nick’s girlfriend is full of dishonesty. She essentially pretends to be an entirely different person—to enjoy things that she hates—in order to seduce him. But she learns an important, if difficult, lesson from this experience: You can’t expect someone to understand who you are and what you want if you never allow them to get to know the real you.
It’s a tough pill to swallow, but upon her realization, Mack stops acting and tries for a more honest approach in her relationships.
A man walks a woman to the subway at night to make her feel safe. Mack and her friends are generally very supportive of one another. People try to make up for their mistakes.
When Mack is nearly caught in a lie about having a brother, she and Adam state that she meant her “Christian” brother. We hear that three separate popes held Mass in the old Yankees stadium (which has since been torn down). We also hear that 15,000 people gathered there to pray after the events of 9/11.
Mack and her buddies are all about sex. They talk about it constantly—and often in crass detail. And the playbook which guides their evening excursions is solely meant to land at least one of them in bed with their desired target.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Mack has sex with two different guys in this film. The couples kiss passionately and remove clothing (they keep on their undergarments). The scenes change before things get graphic, but we do see Mack moaning as a man’s head dips below the camera.
Brannagan is bisexual, and he runs plays on both men and women throughout the film, often commenting on these hookups the next day.
At least one unmarried couple lives together for a short time. And it’s implied that Mack and Nick’s relationship is sexual. Couples kiss in several different scenes. In addition to some crude discussions about sex, we also hear about male and female genitals.
Women wear revealing outfits, and Mack’s wardrobe consists largely of bra tops. In one scene she props up her breasts before asking Adam how they look. We see the tops of a man’s thighs as he uses the toilet. Someone is compared to a prostitute. A joke includes a reference to statutory rape.
We learn a man feels guilty over one of his past sexual encounters, believing that he may have taken advantage of a woman.
Brannagan, who writes obituaries for a paper, often makes crude jokes about death. And he cites how playwright Tennessee Williams died by choking on a bottle cap. Other people make some inappropriate jokes about death and suicide.
Mack watches a few kickboxing matches live and on television. A man sports a black eye after a failed flirting attempt.
A few characters are playfully tackled. We hear a man saved a child from a burning building. Nick says he doesn’t share food because people have attempted to poison him before. He is also writing a book about what he calls an “inevitable genocide.”
Folks eat a fish that still has its head attached, and the dead eyes freak out Adam.
There are about 25 uses of the f-word and 30 of the s-word. We also hear several uses each of “a–,” “d–n,” “d–mit,” “d–k,” “h—” and “p-ss.”
God’s name is abused 25 times, thrice paired with “d–n.” And Christ’s name is abused three times as well.
Many scenes in this film take place in bars (since that’s where Mack and her pals tend to find their sexual partners on any given evening). And they all drink quite a bit during these outings.
Little lights a cigarette for Mack (part of one of their plays) but chokes on the smoke as he does so. A woman pretends to be drunk, spits up on herself and even vomits (or pretends to) into some bushes. We hear a woman went to rehab. A man passes out drunk at a bar after drinking heavily with his coworkers.
Every play in Mack’s playbook is built on a lie. And she and her friends have gotten pretty good at deception over the decade that they’ve been running plays. But Mack is offended when someone calls her out for it. She tries to defend herself, saying that even her marks knew she was lying, but they just didn’t care. She also says it isn’t any different from the lies folks tell on dating apps. However, there are consequences to such blatant dishonesty, which Mack learns the hard way.
As Adam points out to Mack, she was so preoccupied trying to see if she could get Nick, she never stopped to consider if she should.
Nick can be quite arrogant and condescending. He dismisses many of the things Mack likes. He insults her friends. And he hides important information from her because it would be “awkward,” showing that he’s not quite as grown up as she believed him to be.
Mack and her friends basically stalk Nick, gathering information about his habits, likes and dislikes in order to set the stage for Mack to seduce him. When Nick goes on a date with a woman, they fake an emergency call to the hospital so the woman, who is a doctor, will have to leave the date early.
Some people correct a guy after he says “girl” instead of “woman” while talking about an adult female. When Mack uses the word “Midget,” Nick tries to correct her, thinking she’s talking about little people. She’s actually referring to a specific type of car.
People openly discuss their bowel movements. Someone belches. We see a homeless man living on the street. We hear Mack regularly steals office supplies. Someone makes a sexist remark about men, stating that it will be nearly impossible to make Nick see Mack as anything but a one-night stand since that’s how they met.
Look, I’ll be pretty frank here. While the plot of Players is all about turning a one-night stand into a long-standing grown-up relationship, the film is still rooted in hookup culture.
There isn’t graphic nudity, but there are a couple of sex scenes. And sex, we’re told, isn’t something that should only occur between husband and wife but rather something that everyone should be doing all the time with whomever they desire (including folks of the same sex). And if you need to lie in order to seduce the object of your desire? Well, that’s all part of the game.
But if casual sexual encounters are only strike one, foul language and crude humor make for strikes two and three.
Mack is told that her best play to win a relationship is the “no play.” But I’d say that the best play for viewers, too, is the “no play.” As in, don’t play this movie.
Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.
