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“Deep Cover” opens on a quote — the adage that in comedy, as in battle, you must be prepared to die if you want to kill — that is low-hanging fruit for any snarky critics seeking an easy jab. In truth, however, this knockabout action farce neither dies nor kills, even as its onscreen body count ramps up: It just chugs along enthusiastically for 99 minutes, throwing about a lot of slapstick and a lot of quips, but only intermittently landing an outright laugh. Starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Orlando Bloom and Nick Mohammed as desperate improv comics improbably snared up in the London underworld, it’s busier than it is funny, more frenetic than dynamic, but watchable enough.
For producer and co-writer Colin Trevorrow, “Deep Cover” marks a return to the scrappier genre comedy of his breakthrough “Safety Not Guaranteed” after years on the big-budget franchise beat. His original screenplay, written with longtime collaborator Derek Connolly, has been given a transatlantic makeover by offbeat sketch-comedy duo Ben Ashenden and Alexander Owen, while directing duties have been handed to fellow Brit Tom Kingsley, helming his first feature since the slyly surreal indies “Black Pond” and “The Darkest Universe.” The result is a palpable mixture of Hollywood and British sensibilities, alternately brash and cozy-quirky, with the joins sometimes awkwardly felt. After its world premiere at the inaugural SXSW London festival, the film will play Tribeca, before heading directly to Amazon Prime Video.
The Anglo-American fusion extends to the casting, with Trevorrow’s “Jurassic World” star Howard heading up proceedings as Kat, a U.S. expat eking out a living in London as an improv comedy teacher, having failed in her grander acting ambitions. If Howard, an actor most at home when playing it straight, seems a slightly odd fit for the part, “Deep Cover” never shows us Kat’s onstage comic stylings. Also out of place is Bloom’s Marlon, one of Kat’s students and a dour would-be thespian, though his rank unsuitability for the comedy-club scene is more of a running gag.
Appreciably funnier than both is “Ted Lasso” star Mohammed as Hugh, a nebbishy, socially inept IT worker with distant daydreams of comedy stardom, hardly likely to be realized by Kat’s sunny, soft-touch coaching. A rather different opportunity arises, however, when Kat is approached after a show by grizzled narcotics cop Billings (Sean Bean), who has hit on the idea of recruiting comedians — supposedly well-qualified in role-playing and thinking on their feet — as undercover agents to bust small-time criminals. What can possibly go wrong? Everything, beginning with Kat’s last-resort choice of accomplices: When her star performers are snapped up by an agent, Hugh and Marlon it is.
Their bungled first sting as a trio is one of the film’s most successful comic setpieces — Mohammed coming in at a critical moment with a perfectly mistimed “yes, and…” is a high point — though it somehow lands them accidental entry into the lair of drug kingpin Fly (Paddy Considine, barely shifting gears from his current role on TV’s “MobLand”), who’s inexplicably impressed by their bumbling thug act. By the time they’re introduced to rather more skeptical mob boss Metcalfe (Ian McShane), they’re in too deep to get out.
The rote gang war that ensues consumes rather too much focus in a script that is better on more genial, character-based subplots and asides. Co-writers Ashenden and Owen reserve some of their wittiest dialogue for themselves, playing a straight-arrow pair of Scotland Yard detectives on the amateurs’ tail, oblivious to Billings’ scheme — though the tonal lurch between their scenes of droll, deadpan banter and the broader mugging of the core trio is jarring.
“Deep Cover” is shakiest, however, when it dips into straight-up action territory, often with a degree of violence that sits uneasily with the cheery comedy elsewhere. A breakneck car chase at the outset of the film is confusingly motivated and choppily cut; the rhythm of various fight sequences is likewise frantic. That’s arguably fitting for a film about clumsy civilians plunged into the deep end of criminal combat, but too often the film itself feels like it’s hesitantly adopting the swagger and patter of harder-boiled genre fare, and hoping to get away with it.
English (US) ·