Improv-inspired action-comedy Deep Cover is making it up as it goes along
"Improv comics as undercover cops" is the amusing premise, but the film stays shallow throughout its runtime.
Photo: Amazon MGM Studios
A film about improv comedians who become undercover agents is a slightly more inspired premise than the humorless title Deep Cover would suggest. But perhaps casting Bryce Dallas Howard as a veteran improv teacher only bolsters this disconnect in concept and execution. Directed by Tom Kinglsey (who’s mostly done TV comedies like Ghosts and Stath Lets Flats), Deep Cover follows Howard’s character, Kat, a comic hopeful who’s started to see her prime in her rearview. She manages her days as an American expat in London teaching comedy to much younger students who still have a chance at making it. When she’s not watching her pupils get snapped up by agents, she fields invasive questions and concerns from her more successful friends who are married and expecting children. More than anything, she wants to feel like the passion she has dedicated her life to still makes her useful, which makes her an easy mark for Officer Billings (Sean Bean).
Meanwhile, tech stooge Hugh (Nick Mohammed) struggles to connect with his coworkers. He’s only in charge of his nameless company’s WiFi, and so he remains a timid outsider whose desperate attempts to fit in are shunned by his fellow employees. That’s why he stumbles into one of Kat’s improv classes, figuring it a fair shot at learning some skills for interacting with the people he works with. He joins Kat’s class on the same night as Marlon (Orlando Bloom), a small-time actor whose ambitions towards super-serious art are undercut by the commercial auditions that are all his agent can get him. The three are caught in a perfect storm when Kat is approached at her comedy club by Billings, who wants to recruit her and other comics for an unorthodox task. Figuring improv comedians to be adept at thinking on their feet, he’s keen to hire them in order to nab small-time counterfeiters in sting operations. Kat is eager for her second chance and, as her two best students have just been signed, she looks to her only available options for backup: newbies Hugh and Marlon.
The trio go undercover at a gas station, but their improv-based advice to “Yes, and…” any and all conversations with the shady clerk leads them, fittingly, into an escalating series of events that gets them in way over their head. They end up accidentally in the good graces of Fly (Paddy Considine), a power player in the London coke scene. Billings then changes course: He now wants the three bozos to go “deep cover” within Fly’s team and take down Fly’s kingpin superior, the menacing Metcalfe (Ian McShane). Of course, Kat, Marlon, and Hugh are placed haphazardly into increasingly extreme situations of proving that they’re the real deal, which gets a real police investigation team on their tail; amusingly, they think the improv comics are the real masterminds behind everything. Yet in a film so ostensibly indebted to improv, one would think Deep Cover would have cast real improv comedians or have any genuine improv style in its tone or jokes. Instead, Howard strains credibility as a character meant to be a veteran comic because, well, she just isn’t funny at all.