Playdate
Entry updated 5 January 2026. Tagged: Film.
US film (2025). Amazon MGM Studios. Directed by Luke Greenfield. Written by Neil Goldman. Cast includes Sarah Chalke, Kevin James, Hiro Kanagawa, Benjamin Pajak, Banks Pierce, Alan Ritchson and Alan Tudyk. 94 minutes. Colour.
Comedy Technothriller in which newly unemployed accountant Brian (James) reluctantly embraces his role as a stay-at-home stepdad to the teenage Lucas (Pajak). They encounter an alleged father-and-son, Jeff (Ritchson) and CJ (Pierce) at the playground, who encourage them to set up a playdate. Interrupted by pursuing mercenaries, Jeff reveals that he is a former Delta Force soldier, who liberated the captive CJ from the facility where he was working as a security guard, and that the two of them are now on the run.
CJ is ultimately revealed as "Clone Jeff", the last and most accomplished iteration of dozens of super-soldiers created from Jeff's tissue without his knowledge, under the guise of drugs tests, ordered by Jeff's former commanding officer Kurtz (Kanagawa).
A story pitch familiar from many a twentieth-century potboiler, including Universal Soldier (1992) and Akira (1988), takes on a new, family-oriented tone in a 2020s Media Landscape dominated by streamers providing movies direct to home cinemas. An enquiry into genetic determinism in the manner of The Boys from Brazil (1978) plays second string to philosophies of parenthood, along lines previously explored in Netflix's The Adam Project (2022). Jeff's "failing" as a soldier, that he is too empathetic, is his saving grace as a father, and wins over the supposedly heartless CJ, who embraces his found family and comes to his rescue. The implication that the clones can be rehabilitated through parental attention is compromised by the movie's closing big bang, in which Jeff gleefully destroys the facility, slaying dozens of other CJs who are presumably irredeemable or just unlucky. [JonC]
see also: Alien Resurrection; Everything Everywhere All at Once.
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