This Lifetime-ready comedy is hardly provocative -- let alone perceptive, funny, or fresh.
Comment
08/25/09
Play the Game (2009)
28
%
Tomatometer
How does the Tomatometer work 
Reviews Counted:29
Fresh:8
Rotten:21
Average Rating:4.3/10
Consensus: Andy Griffith is his usually likable self, but he's stranded in a middling comedy that's surprisingly tasteless and poorly crafted.
Genre: Comedies
Synopsis: Writer/Director Marc Fienberg’s PLAY THE GAME is an original comedy with surprising and clever twists about a young ladies' man, David, who teaches his dating tricks to his lonely, widowed... [More]
Starring: Andy Griffith, Paul Campbell, Liz Sheridan, Doris Roberts
Director: Marc Fienberg
Reviews for Play the Game
Surely, there is a way of expressing the joy of sex without the potty-mouthed dialogue that desecrates the persona of a television and movie icon.
08/27/09
The comedy's broad perfs, predictable story beats and pro but characterless packaging have a smallscreen feel.
08/20/09
Top CriticStay home and find yourself a Golden Girls marathon.
08/28/09
This isn't so much sitcom fare as dinner-theatre material, directed without an ounce of style or panache and played more broadly than an old vaudeville routine.
09/10/09
A film in which comedic maturity is measured in jokes about hemorrhoids, constipation, and erectile dysfunction.
08/27/09
There's a good comedy to be made about sex among seniors, but the low-budget indie film Play the Game is not that movie.
10/15/09
Surprisingly sexual in nature, and not just because it seems so concerned with the sex practices of the elderly. There's too much of that sort of material here and not nearly enough of the stuff we really want to see.
11/12/09
The sight of the once-great Griffith cruising at a singles bar in a backward baseball cap isn't the worst of it.
08/27/09
The good news is that the seemingly perennial TV fixture is still funny and sharp and folksy. The bad news is that he lost the bet, or whatever it was that got him into Marc Fienberg's smarmy, lackluster comedy.
08/28/09
This agonizing romantic comedy about a nice boy and his grandpa relearning the 'game of love' raises far more questions than it answers.
04/02/09
Griffith improvises an orgasm that seems to last as long as the entire eight-year run of The Andy Griffith Show.
08/28/09
Hearing Griffith say, 'David, grandpa's horny,' is not something anyone should have to experience.
08/27/09
Play the Game has all kinds of good intentions, but the comedy is too broad and the pacing is clumsy. Take away the dirty parts, and this is the type of thing you can get for free on the Hallmark Channel every day.
08/28/09
Veering between syrupy sweet and awkwardly dirty, Play the Game is a woefully scoreless exercise.
08/28/09
Top CriticIt’s The Andy Griffith Show meets Seinfeld in the sack in Play the Game, which shows Andy is not too old to star in a sex comedy, I guess.
08/27/09
Top CriticPlay the Game takes an interminable hour to get going. Every scene, every line reading, plays slow. There's no snap to it.
04/01/09
I never contemplated what Andy Griffith's face would look like during orgasm, and I curse this atrocious and shoddy romantic comedy for making Griffith do it and making anyone watch it.
11/13/09
Did you ever wonder what face Andy Griffith makes when he's having an intimate moment with a lady friend? Me neither. Yet that's one of many "delights" foisted on us during writer-director Marc Fienberg's feature-length debut comedy.
08/28/09
The scene in which Alzheimer's is played as a dating dealbreaker is as stunningly tasteless as Fienberg's zooming-in on Joe's face when he receives his first blowjob.
08/28/09
Latest News for Play the Game
August 27, 2009:
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July 26, 2009:
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