Deep Cover review – Bryce Dallas Howard leads improv actors into London's underground
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.
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