18/06/2025 - Tom Kingsley’s third feature is a pleasant enough London-set comedy mixing improv theatre antics with gangland grit, to uneven effect

l-r: Paddy Considine, Bryce Dallas Howard, Nick Mohammed and Orlando Bloom in Deep Cover

Premiering internationally in the Spotlight Narrative section of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, Deep Cover is a tonally uneven action-comedy that tries to blend improv theatre antics with gangland grit, but never quite manages to stitch the two together convincingly. Directed by Ghosts and Stath Lets Flats alumnus Tom Kingsley, and penned by a quartet including Jurassic World [+see also:
trailer
film profile]’s Colin Trevorrow, Ben Asheden, Alexander Owen and Derek Connolly, the film boasts a slick look and a starry British cast, yet it ultimately feels like a throwback to early-2000s Hollywood comedies, where quirky setups often stood in for narrative logic.

Bryce Dallas Howard plays Kat, a struggling improv instructor who, alongside two of her hapless students – failed Method-acting thesp Marlon (Orlando Bloom) and the irredeemably clumsy Hugh (Nick Mohammed), who joins the class in the blink of an eye for absolutely no reason – is enlisted by a mysterious man (Sean Bean) claiming to be a police officer. His outlandish proposition? Go undercover to help bust a ring of petty criminals. From there, things spiral wildly out of control as the trio stumble their way through increasingly dangerous situations in the London underworld, trying to stay in character as hardened crooks while their own lives begin to unravel.

The premise is thin and stretches believability from the outset. That these three amateurs would so readily trust a stranger’s recruitment pitch – or that they would manage to fool a slew of hardened criminals – is hard to swallow. Bean’s character appears out of nowhere and makes an absurd offer, after all. It’s a setup that could have worked had the film leaned more decisively into absurdism or parody, but Deep Cover wavers, unsure of whether to be a knowing genre pastiche or a more grounded farce.

Howard and Bloom give it their best shot, with the latter showing surprising comedic timing, but the real wild card is Mohammed. His Hugh is a walking compendium of slapstick archetypes – somewhere between Italy’s Fantozzi, Mr Bean, The Big Bang Theory’s Raj Koothrappali and Mr Magoo – but the result is more tired than inspired. His bumbling is repetitive, bordering on grating, and undercuts the film’s occasional attempts at emotional or narrative investment.

Visually, the movie is competent and occasionally stylish, with Will Hanke’s cinematography offering a crisp, colourful take on the London setting. But Kingsley’s pacing falters; plot twists are layered in with little narrative payoff, giving the flick a meandering feel that saps momentum just when it should be ramping it up. Daniel Pemberton’s score is effective if unmemorable, doing what it can to keep things zippy.

Paddy Considine is one of the few genuine bright spots here. As an ageing mobster, he injects real energy into the film, even if his character is written as a tad too daft for someone supposedly hardened by decades in the criminal underworld.

To its credit, Deep Cover isn’t without a few inspired moments. Some gruesome, surreal touches pepper the narrative, adding texture and surprise, and the cast seems to be having fun. But fun alone isn’t enough to carry a 100-minute feature that struggles to justify its own premise.

This is ultimately a light-hearted divertissement, more suited to a casual evening on a streaming platform than a prestigious festival slot. Despite the talent involved, Deep Cover lands as a mildly amusing but largely forgettable piece of genre fluff – a caper with flashes of flair but not enough bite to stand out in a crowded marketplace.

Deep Cover was staged by British firms Metronome Film Company, Parkes+MacDonald and ImageNation. Amazon Prime Video is distributing it.