Producer and screenwriter Colin Trevorrow has co-created this amiable, high-concept action comedy about three hapless improv actors dragooned into going into deep cover to bust a drug ring. It’s entertaining, though I think some of the cast understand comedy better and more instinctively than others. It’s set in London (though Trevorrow might originally have imagined it set in LA or New York) and the credit is shared with his longtime writing partner Derek Connolly, and also with Ben Ashenden and Alexander Owen, the funny British double act known as the Pin, who also amusingly appear as two squabbling coppers with a Mitchell and Webb energy. The director is the talented Tom Kingsley, who has a substantial TV career and with Will Sharpe got a Bafta nomination in 2012 for the dark comedy Black Pond.
Bryce Dallas Howard plays Kat, an American actor whose career is tanking and who now runs an improv workshop in London. Orlando Bloom is Marlon (as in Brando), a smoulderingly hunky method performer and wannabe star reduced to doing TV commercials, and Nick Mohammed is Hugh, a sweet, shy beta-male IT guy who gets bullied in the office and turns to Kat’s improv classes as a way of boosting his self-esteem. The lives of all three are turned upside down when hard-faced Met cop Detective Billings, played by Sean Bean, offers these cash-strapped losers £200 each to infiltrate a criminal organisation run by a narcotics kingpin played by Paddy Considine, on the grounds that career officers are too easily recognisable.
It’s a nice idea (and I wrongly guessed a final twist). Howard gamely gives it her all, though her air of bafflement sometimes didn’t look entirely intentional; Bloom as the absurd badass Marlon comes closer to it. But Mohammed, Ashenden and Owen are the ones capable of relaxing more naturally into the comedy mode and delivering funny lines. There are some laughs and it’s always likable.
• Deep Cover is on Prime Video from 12 June.
