Deep Cover screened at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival and is premiering on Amazon Prime today.
Kat (Bryce Dallas Howard) is an American living in London, her dreams of comedy career having never taken off. After ten years, she is not only not headlining at clubs or theaters as she hoped for, she is making ends meet by teaching an improv class where she she sees some of her students vaulting past her in their own careers. One evening, after a students showcase performance, Kat is approached by a police inspector looking to use her and two other students in what should be a small bust of a convenience store selling unlicensed cigarettes. Taking with her the only two students available – Marlon (Orlando Bloom), a very method actor, and shy, awkward Nick (Nick Mohammed) – the trio inadvertently find themselves deeply involved with a gang of drug runners led by a criminal named Fly (Paddy Considine). Try as they might to extricate themselves, they find they continue to fall up the criminal organization’s ladder until they find themselves face-to-face with one of London’s most notorious gangsters, Metcalfe (Ian McShane, having himself a hammy good time).
Deep Cover sounds like it has the potential for some high comedy, but it never seems to quite reach for it. The screenplay – credited to Derek Connolly, Colin Trevorrow, Ben Ashenden and Alexander Owen – certainly provides a good setup for a comedic crime film but doesn’t seem interested in fully exploring the comedic possibilities. The script does provide a couple of comic set pieces; one involving the trio trying to escape some gangsters and the other featuring them fleeing the police. But director Tom Kingsley seems to take the tact of keeping these sequences more grounded than comedic, evoking some chuckles at best instead of hearty laughs.
To their credit, the cast, who all have experience in both comedy and drama, is game and do their best with the material. Bloom seems to be enjoying taking his deep method acting actor character just up to the point of parody without ever quite going over the line. Mohammed does some especially nice work as his character slowly finds their inner courage and starts to fall for Fly’s lieutenant Shosh (Sonoya Mizuno). It is because of the performances that one stays engaged with the film at all.
There’s a point early on where Kat advises her improv students that a scene is funny because the two participants weren’t trying to go for jokes, they were just playing it normally and the comedy would would follow from the interaction. Unfortunately, that advice doesn’t seem to apply to Deep Cover overall.
