Summary
Deep Cover blends an A-list cast with a humble sketch-comedy core to brilliant effect. It’s a near-perfect crowd-pleaser.
You can’t trust a great cast these days. Fountain of Youth had a pretty good one, and it was rubbish, which is always the expectation when something debuts on streaming with big-name billing. What went wrong? What is the movie hiding? These are the inevitable questions of a cynical entertainment culture that treats artistic output as a content conveyor belt. Deep Cover, starring a who’s-who of legitimate movie stars and streaming on Prime Video, should be setting off alarm bells.
But Deep Cover is awesome. It’s near-perfect popcorn entertainment, an action-comedy with okay action and really funny comedy that puts its all-star cast to work playing exaggerated pastiches of their usual screen personas. It’s director Tom Kingsley dressing offbeat British daftness up in Hollywood trappings, with a razor-sharp script and a crowd-pleasing vibe that isn’t trying to do anything special but is totally and utterly committed to being entertaining. How refreshing.
The plot setup is ideal for sketch comedy duo Ben Ashenden and Alexander Owen, who wrote the script with Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow (Jurassic World). It finds three struggling improv comedians hired off-the-books by Detective Sergeant Billings (Sean Bean, Snowpiercer) to carry out a simple sting that snowballs into an undercover operation deep in London’s criminal underworld. Kat (Bryce Dallas Howard, Jurassic World) is an improv teacher whose snooty friends think she’s chasing a dream she’ll never reach; Marlon (Orlando Bloom, Carnival Row, Unlocked) sees himself as a misunderstood method actor; and Hugh (Nick Mohammed, Ted Lasso) is a put-upon accountant who just wants to be liked. Together, they’re not exactly a great crime-fighting team. But somehow their consistent failures end up getting them closer and closer to the heart of the operation, which finds terrifying mob boss Metcalfe (Ian McShane, Ballerina, The Continental, My Father’s Dragon) ordering around local capo Fly (Paddy Considine, MobLand, Informer) and his fearsome enforcer, Shosh (House of the Dragon’s Sonoya Mizuno).
Orlando Bloom, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Nick Mohammed in Deep Cover | Image via Apple TV+
Everyone’s great in this, but Orlando Bloom best embodies the excellently funny core idea of just making things up as you go along. His Marlon is a deeply bonkers, classically-trained method actor who’s too serious to get any proper work but too delusional to realize why. The best recurring gag of Deep Cover is the increasingly complicated backstory he develops for his made-up Mancunian gangster cover character, which reaches pleasantly absurd levels when he adds too much drama to his tales of fighting in Afghanistan and ends up having to run with the idea that he was working with the Taliban.
Owen and Ashenden – who both star as cops Beverly and Dawes, a very funny odd-couple double-act with the former constantly spouting crime movie cliches that don’t make sense in context – know better than to have everyone behave as theatrically as Bloom, so Hugh is essentially the polar opposite and Kat lands somewhere in the middle. It’s a brilliant balance, and the interplay between the characters has that distinct feeling of off-the-cuff improvisation, even though it has likely been precisely written and militantly rehearsed. That’s a really difficult balance to achieve, and Deep Cover manages it with remarkable consistency. This isn’t the kind of movie that would win anything awards-wise, which seems a shame given how good the script is.
But who cares? Deep Cover isn’t the kind of movie that’s trying to court plaudits or impress snooty critics like me. It’s a crowd pleaser that understands it’s funny to have Hollywood A-listers indulge in sketch-comedy theatrics. Everyone here knows exactly what kind of movie they’re in, and the movie ends up being significantly better as a result. They rarely make ‘em like this anymore, so I hope people stream this in big numbers to send a message that there’s always room for silly, fun filmmaking that puts entertainment first and foremost.
