An odd rogue’s gallery of talent came together in Deep Cover (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video), a slick, goofy action-comedy that’s funny as hell. Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow produces and co-writes, with British comedy duo Ben Ashenden and Alexander Owen writing and taking supporting roles, and Tom Kingsley (Black Pond) directing a motley ensemble led by Bryce Dallas Howard, Orlando Bloom and Nick Mohammed, with memorable character turns from Sean Bean, Paddy Considine and Ian McShane. The result is more inspired than it probably has any right to be.
The Gist: LONDON. We meet Hugh (Ted Lasso’s Nick Mohammed) at his crummy office job, where he’s the IT guy who very awkwardly tries to hang with the bros and is told to “stick with the wifi.” We meet Marlon (Bloom) as he auditions for a boner-pill ad like he’s his namesake, as in “Brando,” and is reminded by an impatient casting director that our thespian here is best known for playing “The Pizza Knight” in a series of commercials. We meet Kat (Howard), an American abroad so as to avoid anyone adopting any unruly accents, as she teaches a group of wannabe comedians the fundamentals of improvisation, and then is met with furrowed-brow condescension from her posh friends when she tries to share her career frustrations with them.
What do these three have in common? They’re all a little lonely, possibly sad and definitely aimless. What do they need? Probably a good friend who listens well, a vacation and a smidge of therapy, but Deep Cover isn’t that kind of movie. What the movie gives them instead is a ridiculous opportunity to broaden their career horizons, which bloom (no pun intended) when Marlon and Hugh take Kat’s class, and are subsequently approached by Billings (Bean; please note the low-key LOTR reunion here), a grizzled cop who smells their desperation and offers them 200 quid each to use their improv skills to go undercover and help him bust a counterfeit-cigarette ring. His pitch? “You heard of Donnie Brasco? Serpico?” And they’re hooked – Kat becomes Bonnie, Marlon becomes Roach, and Hugh is The Squire. Besides, the stakes are so low, these three dingdongs can surely handle it, no?
Um. About that. Kat can hold her own. But Hugh looks like a squirrel paralyzed by the lights of an oncoming Subaru and Marlon insists on crafting a war-veteran backstory and wearing a prosthetic scar so he can get “in character.” Right: oh brother. But it’s just shitty cigarettes – until their Kat-taught “yes, and” improv training escalates the drama and leads them past a shady shopkeep, into a den of hardcase career drugs-and-guns criminals fronted by Fly (Considine) and his ninja-like enforcer Shosh (Sonoya Mizuno), all of whom work for lunatic mob boss Metcalfe (Ian McShane). Meanwhile, a couple of other cops, one a doofus (Owen) and the other (Ashenden) a doofus for agreeing to work with the doofus, sniff around the scenario. You will not be shocked to learn that our misfit trio gets in far deeper than they should, and that hijinks ensue. So will they kill, as in comedy, or just end up getting killed, as in crime?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Not to be confused with Deep Cover (1992), Deep Cover (2025) is essentially The Departed crossed with Hot Fuzz.
Performance Worth Watching: It’s honestly hard to pick a winner: A wily-committed turn from Bloom, who does the clueless-narcissist-actor thing without being too inside-baseball (read: there’s only one throwaway line about Method acting), is a contender, and Mohammed does a mighty funny flummox. But as a Deadwood lifer, I’m compelled to go with McShane, who widens his eyes and drives all over the road in his three-to-four scenes, his accent weaving through every U.K. county you can possibly clock. He’s so funny he’s scary and so scary he’s funny.
Memorable Dialogue: The doof trio muddles its way out of a tight spot with a burly hitman:
Kat: You threatened to iron his dick!
Marlon: It’s where the scene went.
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Deep Cover is the type of wacky-goofball flick that normally would leave me crossarmed and frowning, but here we are, contemplating how far a well-considered cast and a dozen-and-a-half smartly delivered one-liners can go: 99 minutes. Which is just about perfect, as it turns out. Howard is the straight person in this plot, a solid-concrete foundation for shenanigans that walk the line between loosey-goosey and tightly crafted: Shosh is attracted to Hugh’s tweedy Paddington vibes, Marlon’s OTT seriousness actually works in these criminal situations, McShane fricassees the scenery and gleefully devours it, etc. There’s a particularly comically grim moment in which Marlon growls “Let’s see De Niro do this,” and he absolutely has a point – De Niro’s track record in similarly ridiculous comedies is somewhere between awful and moribund.
Not that the film is dumb enough to believe a bevy of meta-jokes is high-grade grist for the comedy mill. It’s as if Trevorrow and co. consumed all the DOA action-comedies in the clogged streaming-movie drainpipe – I list the titles Red Notice, Ghosted, Back in Action and several Kevin Hart movies as an incantation against their tryhard comic flailing – for what not to do, and ended up with a winning formula: Whip-smart casting for likably lightweight characters, and a writer’s room that crafts jokes out of character instead of cobbling together characters out of jokes. It’s easy to admire Deep Cover for not forcing anything thematically or conceptually; it exists not to satirize (even though it occasionally does it effectively), perch on a pulpit or redefine the kinetic boundaries of action films (notably, the chases and scraps are of the eh, whatever tossed-off quality), but simply to be funny. Consider that modest target fully bullseyed.
Our Call: Deep Cover is nothing more than amusing escapism, and is all the better for it. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.