Critic Reviews

The Player has the feel of one of those high-octane action thrillers that Hollywood pumps out--you get caught up in the moment, but the intricacies of the plot dissolve the second you step out of the theater.

The Player is fun, and doesn’t really try to be anything more than that.

It's an efficient if mass-produced engine--every week a different race against crime and time--made a bit more interesting by the most dangerous game gone digital.... But it's the chemistry between Cassandra and Kane that ignites The Player.

It's hard to see where this all might be going. A nebulous nefarious cabal betting on the outcome of crimes may be the strangest of some of the strange premises for shows this fall, but Winchester is good at being the action hero. If you enjoy that, you might enjoy the show.

Sure, Thursday's pilot is junk, but it's pretty, diligent junk, essentially The Whopper of action TV, heaped high with mayhem condiments.

Winchester is a solid enough presence as Kane.... Although this isn’t a flat-out terrible series, don’t bet on NBC having a winner opposite fearsome time slot competition from CBS’ Thursday Night Football and ABC’s How to Get Away with Murder. No one likes those odds.

Because The Player is wandering into such well-explored territory, it feels limp at its liveliest.

"The Player" has the potential to be enjoyable even if the premise seems like a high-risk, low-reward gamble.

The Player is pulp trash with an admirable sense of its own disposability, running through gimmicks nearly as efficiently as Alex plows through requisitely faceless thugs.

For its combination of silliness revved up to a furious pace, The Player is, as I said at the start, watchable--the kind of visual junk food that you find yourself consuming for an hour before you realize 60 minutes have passed.