In a recent interview with The Independent, actress, director, and fan-favorite nepo baby Bryce Dallas Howard revealed she knows when a work she’s starring in — like the Shyamalan flop Lady in the Water or the baffling spy movie Argylle — is going to be a failure at the box office. “You can always see it coming while you’re making it,” Howard said. “I’ve never been shocked when something doesn’t work.”
Her latest movie, Deep Cover, seems like it would have alerted those same red flags. It’s a straight-to-streaming action comedy with four credited writers and a very strange premise. But clearly, it didn’t, because this isn’t just better than most Prime Video original movies — in fact, it may be the best action-comedy thriller in years.
Deep Cover’s elevator pitch has massive potential: improv comics get plucked from obscurity to use their quick-on-their-feet skills in undercover work. Thankfully, it has every ingredient it needs to wring every bit of juice out of that situation.
Deep Cover stars Howard as Kat, a washed-up American improv teacher with a cynical view on her vocation and an expiring work visa. Her latest crop of Improv 101 students includes Marlon (Orlando Bloom), an “immersive” (not Method, don’t call it Method) actor looking to deepen his character work, and Hugh (Nick Mohammed), a mild-mannered IT guy just trying to be funnier with his coworkers. They are approached by Billings (Sean Bean), a cop looking for help with some small stings. The trio “yes-and” their way through the minor operations, but slowly get themselves embroiled in a massive narcotics bust that gets much bigger than the comics — and even their handler — are prepared for.
This movie expertly balances the action-thriller and comedy tones thanks to its writers, two different pairs of seasoned collaborators. On the spy thriller side are Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow, who together wrote the screenplays for the Jurassic World trilogy. Outside of the shackles of IP, they are able to let loose and tell a great espionage story full of heart and twists that would be perfectly at home in a Bond or Bourne film.
On the comedy side are Ben Ashenden and Alexander Owen, known in comedy circles as The Pin. They also act, both together, like in The Bubble, and separately, like in the most recent seasons of Black Mirror and Andor. In Deep Cover, they play Dawes and Beverley, a pair of cops trying to track down these three new players on the narcotics scene, totally unaware they’re actually on the same side. Their dynamic — Dawes the straight-laced one, Beverley constantly making buddy cop movie references — is a bit cliché, but also quickly becomes the highlight of the already-great dialogue.
Equally matched are the performances. Bryce Dallas Howard’s Kat has just the right amount of 2010s rom-com lead burnout about her, and with her, we get the screwball mixups of her friends running into her while she’s undercover. Orlando Bloom pokes fun at his own pretty-boy acting career while (albeit ironically) launching into monologue after monologue in a gruff accent. Unsurprisingly, Nick Mohammed plays the bumbling Hugh expertly, and naturally gets a romantic subplot with criminal henchwoman Shosh (Sonoya Mizuno).
Director Tom Kingsley may be best known for his work on TV with BBC’s Ghosts and the “Wild Blue Yonder” episode of Doctor Who, but it’s easy to see how this feature could spark a career of streaming originals that are much more than the sum of their parts.
Admittedly, Deep Cover does, at first, sound like a fake movie — even its title comes from a 1992 thriller starring Laurence Fishburne. But it’s not just a real movie; it may be one of the best movies Amazon Prime Video has ever released. If this is the future of the streaming original movie, we just might be so back.
