DEEP COVER (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Deep Cover, Amazon MGM Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 12, 2025

The premise of Deep Cover, in which a trio of improv actors of various levels of skill go undercover for the cops, is so good that it seems set to let us down. We know this process by now from so many modern comedies. Come up with a funny premise. Hire talented and/or funny actors. Hope they'll carry what turns out to be thin material.

However, this group of filmmakers cares about a joke, lets those gags develop here, and doesn't simply coast on what their stars might bring to the film. That they also had the good sense to still hire three talented and funny actors to play the material just turns out to be an added bonus this time.

The setting is London, where some drugs are stolen during an introductory chase sequence that is thankfully unnecessary and doesn't reflect the tone or tactics of the rest of the story. There is more action, to be sure, but the rest of it refuses to take itself seriously.

That's because those subsequent sequences revolve around Kat (Bryce Dallas Howard), Marlon (Orlando Bloom), and Hugh (Nick Mohammed), who definitely are not cut out to be action heroes—no matter how badly one of them wants to be. He would be Marlon, a struggling actor who has taken the Method to heart in ways that escalate so much as things get worse for this group that we have to wonder if anything about the guy is genuine or if it's all a performance.

Marlon's desperate to be taken seriously as an actor, which in his mind means playing tough guys with haunted minds and traumatic back stories. Nobody's buying it, especially when he tries to incorporate his self-serious schtick into an audition for a TV commercial for erectile dysfunction medication. Bloom, himself no stranger to playing the exact kind of characters Marlon wants to be cast as, is quite a good sport here, and the character is funnier because his performance doesn't give away the seams of the joke.

Then, there's Hugh, a tech specialist at a financial firm who's desperate to fit in with people who only pay attention to him when their internet connection is poor. We only need one scene of Hugh awkwardly trying to join a conversation at the office to get the point, but Mohammed, a very funny comedian, keeps finding new ways to be and additional layers of being so uncomfortable around others and in his own skin. He and Bloom are essentially playing one-joke characters, but such is the benefit of smart casting. In the right hands, the joke is funny each and every time.

Finally, we have Kat, an American in the United Kingdom on a soon-to-expire work visa, who believed she'd have a solid acting career by now. Instead, she's teaching improvisation to other actors, most of whom are getting representation and landing gigs before her. Compared to her co-stars, Howard's role is fairly thankless in the comedy department, simply because Kat becomes the one nearly competent player in this scheme. That's important, however. Without her sturdier presence to balance the other two, they might not be as effective.

With those three and their respective degrees of desperation established, the screenplay (written by Derek Connolly, Colin Trevorrow, Ben Ashenden, and Alexander Owen) throws in Billings (Sean Bean), a hardened officer with the London police who recruits Kat for a mission. It's a little sting operation to catch someone selling counterfeit cigarettes and since most criminals can spot an undercover cop with ease, Billings believes no one will see actors coming. Kat convinces Marlon (there to help with his "character work") and Hugh (there on a whim because a flyer in the window says improv can help to boost confidence), mainly because they're the only two in her class remaining without any other acting opportunities in front of them.

The key to the film's success is how everything here escalates, both in the big picture of the plot, which eventually becomes quite a nightmare for our trio, and in the individual bits of comedy. Take that initial sting, which sees the three somehow royally fail their way into the den of a much bigger catch for Billings.

He's Fly (Paddy Considine), a local drug dealer, so now, Kat, Marlon, and Hugh have to convince him, his associates, and a rival gang that they're real deal. This process includes Kat putting on airs of being a big-time gangster from Chicago, Marlon attempting to look tough in front of legitimate tough guys, and Hugh snorting more cocaine than he could even imagine, which is really saying something for how boring he is (The way Mohammed plays that bit, almost in tears from everything—the psychological strain and physical terror, not to mention the drugs—hitting him so quickly, is very funny).

As for the rest of the plot of Deep Cover, it just keeps escalating, turning the three into accidental killers and forcing them to dispose of a different body, and expanding, introducing Ian McShane (pretty much the ultimate escalation in a story like this) as an even more threatening crime lord and bringing in a couple detectives (played by Ashenden and Owen as their own pair of mismatched partners) who have no clue the trio are on official business. Director Tom Kingsley brings a sense of frantic momentum to the entire messy process, and the result is a comedy that's genuinely funny beyond its premise.

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