Film Review: "Deep Cover"
The new action comedy from Amazon is a crowd-pleaser that features a trio of great performances from Bryce Dallas Howard, Orlando Bloom, and Nick Mohammed.
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Warning: Full spoilers for the film follow.
I have a soft spot for action comedies. There’s just something about the mix of laughter and thrills that appeals to me, combining the thought-provoking pleasures of the former with the kinetic pleasures of the latter. Fortunately for me, the past few months have seen a number of really strong action comedies–take a look here if you want to see my review of one of my favorite of these, Fight or Flight–and, more recently, Deep Cover. Unlike so many of the other films that are bumped straight to streaming, this one actually has some substance to it, while never losing sight of the fact that its primary purpose is to be fun.
Deep Cover introduces us to three very different personalities, all of whom have found their way into the rather tragic world of improv. Bryce Dallas Howard’s Kate Boyles is a comedian whose career has never really taken off and teaches improv to pay the bills (barely). Orlando Bloom, meanwhile, is Marlon Swift, who has aspirations of being a true dramatic actor but finds himself saddled with the legacy of having appeared in a very famous pizza commercial. The last member, Hugh (Nick Mohammed) is an IT worker who struggles with a lack of self-confidence and an ability to fit in or bond with his snooty co-workers. The film’s screenplay effectively and efficiently introduces us to these characters, giving us all of the essential information we need about them in order for the rest of the film to make sense.
Their lives are turned upside down when they are recruited by a cop, Sergeant Graham Billings (Sean Bean), who tasks them with infiltrating the criminal underworld. With each step they take, however, they find themselves deeper in, thanks in no small part to their improv skills–Marlon is particularly committed to his performance–and Kate’s undeniable brains. Soon enough, they’ve managed to form a rather strange but also rather touching bond with Paddy Considine’s Fly, even as they also fall afoul of crime lord Metcalfe (an always-fantastic Ian McShane).
It’s not every action comedy that can really hold its disparate elements together, but in this regard Deep Cover more than succeeds. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I was holding my sides with laughter during some of the more ridiculous scenes, particularly involving Marlon. Part of this stems from the fact that it’s still a bit incongruous to see Orlando Bloom hamming it up and being very willing to look ridiculous, but it’s also just a very funny screenplay.
Each of the three leads brings something remarkable to the table. I’m so pleased to see Howard finally getting a role that makes use of her remarkable talents and incandescent charisma, and she creates a character that it’s easy to love and sometimes even admire. It’s easy to see why everyone in the criminal world looks at her as the brains of the outfit, even though she just as clearly has no idea what she’s doing and is just rolling with the punches. As the film repeatedly points out, though, that sort of flexibility is its own form of wisdom and, while Kate might not be the kind of successful actor that she always dreamt of being, she can at least take some comfort from knowing that she might have a future in law enforcement.
Orlando Bloom is just as brilliant as Marlon, yet another actor who has had to grapple with the disappointment of a career that hasn’t gone as well as he’d have liked. I enjoyed the way that the film toyed with his own star text, and it’s easy to see a few shades of Legolas in Marlon’s Pizza Knight (a mascot that he plays in a number of highly successful and very…cheesy…commercials). In much the same way that Legolas has tended to overshadow Bloom’s career as an actor–relegating him to the realm of the “pretty boy” more famous for his looks than his talent, Pizza Knight is the scourge to Marlon’s highbrow pretensions. In Deep Cover Bloom is nothing short of hilarious, and watching him play an actor struggling to be taken seriously is the kind of layered performance which he has repeatedly shown he excels at delivering. Also, to be blunt, Bloom is aging into quite the daddy.
Lastly, there’s Nick Mohammed, who really burst onto the scene with Ted Lasso, in which he played Nate, a mouse who soon becomes a lion. He is in his element in Deep Cover, where he once again plays a socially awkward and borderline strange character who slowly becomes more self-assured. Watching his character snort a line (or several lines) of coke while deep undercover is predictably hilarious, and it’s impossible to imagine anyone other than Mohammed in this role.
The baddies are just as fun in their own way. It’s always nice to see Sean Bean, of course, and he does a remarkably good job creating a crooked cop, the type of guy who’s more than happy to manipulate desperate actors to do what he wants, right up to the point where he ends up with a bullet in his brain. Ian McShane never met a piece of scenery that he couldn’t chew to pieces, and he is in his element as Metcalfe, the big boss who is determined to root out the rat who has put his operation at risk. I will always sign up for a movie where we get to see McShane play a badass.
For my money, though, it’s Paddy Considine who often steals the show. He effortlessly slides into the role of a criminal with aplomb and, despite the fact that Fly is quite capable of brutal violence, he also has a softer side. I mean, this is a man who, tasked by his boss with killing the rats–our central trio–decides that he likes them too much to go through with this brutal act. Given that he’s putting his own life on the line by letting them go free, and that he’s willing to turn against the criminal world of which he’s been a part for so long, he’s clearly not all bad.
As should be clear by now, I really did love this movie. It’s a fun popcorn flick that never takes itself too seriously and, while there were a few bumps in the story–the pair of cops that attempt to track down our trio, convinced that they’re some kind of super-criminals, are a bit of a distraction without much payoff–for the most part Deep Cover doesn’t outstay its welcome. Given just how many movies suffer from narrative bloat these days, that’s nothing short of a miracle.
In any case, this is the kind of movie that makes for fine summer viewing, and I’m just a little disappointed that it didn’t get a theatrical release. Watch it if you can. I think you’ll enjoy it, too.