By I always find it strange when a movie like Deep Cover pops up at the Tribeca Film Festival. It has nothing to do with the quality of the film, mind you, but more so the scale of it. The Tribeca Film Festival features a lot of smaller, more intimate films that feel decidedly indie. The films that debut here, for the most part, don’t go on to become major box office smashes, if they get a theatrical release at all. Tribeca occasionally premieres major movies like In The Heights, but, at the very least, for a New York-based film festival, featuring a film centered around New York life is logical.
Deep Cover doesn’t really have that excuse, and it’s definitely not an indie film. Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow wrote it, originally conceiving the film while working together on Jurassic World; it gestated on and off for almost a decade. It’s made by MGM and debuted on Prime Video, one of the largest streaming platforms out there. It stars big actors like Bryce Dallas Howard, Orlando Bloom, Sean Bean, and Ian McShane. No matter how you look at it, Deep Cover doesn’t fit the conventional Tribeca mold.
Does any of that actually matter at the end of the day? Not really, because while it may not fit the mold of the types of films that premiere at Tribeca, it doesn’t make Deep Cover a bad movie. In fact, it’s a pretty entertaining one. Not revolutionary, but in between hefty documentaries and unconventional narratives, having something familiar and safe made the film stand out all the more in my mind, even if it wouldn’t have done so if I saw it on my own.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x–MaHsbEc&pp=ygUSZGVlcCBjb3ZlciB0cmFpbGVy
Deep Cover
Director: Tom Kingsley
Release Date: June 10, 2025 (Tribeca Film Festival), June 12, 2025 (Prime Video)
Set in London, Deep Cover follows three down-on-their-luck people, each of them struggling in their own ways. Kat (Bryce Dallas Howard) teaches improv but is barely able to pay rent and wants to be successful. Then there’s her student, Marlon (Orlando Bloom), a serious method actor who can only get embarrassing commercial jobs where he’s a knight advertising microwave pizza. Finally, there’s Hugh (Nick Mohammed), a socially awkward IT worker who joins Kat’s acting classes to try to develop better socialization skills since he’s the punching bag at his office.
Kat is approached by a man named Billings (Sean Bean), a cop who is requesting her to volunteer a few actors from her class to participate in low-level sting operations to bust petty drug thieves. Given that there’s no one else who would actually do something like this, Kat ropes in Marlon and Hugh, who somehow bumble their way into London’s cocaine drug trade and try desperately to make everyone believe they’re hardened criminals so that they can survive another day. Hopefully, they’ll be able to take down the kingpin of the whole organization, played by Ian McShane, and walk away from it all. Maybe their cover will get blown. Maybe the rest of the police will arrest them, since no one knows about Billings’ operation. Or maybe everything will work out perfectly (it doesn’t).
As a former actor, I love the concept of having a bunch of poorly trained improv actors forced to act for their lives. Improv isn’t easy, and seeing our trio of heroes cook up whatever lie they can come up with to stay alive feels stupid in all the right ways. While Kat can convincingly fool the drug dealers, watching Marlon cook up more ridiculous backstories for his persona is both pathetic and hilarious, and seeing Hugh act like a deer in headlights whenever anyone looks at him captures the feeling of not knowing what to do in a scene perfectly. I’ve been there, and all the degrees of improv are present. There’s someone who knows what they’re doing, someone who has no clue what they’re doing, and someone who is so in their own mind that no one knows what they’re doing.
For a movie billing itself as an action-comedy, the action part is a bit on the light side. There’s a chase scene in the middle and kind of a gunfight at the end of the film, so don’t go into Deep Cover expecting an action spectacle. The focus here is clearly on the comedy, and it’s the kind of comedy that used to be a solid mid-budget theatrical release. Think of films like The Other Guys, The Nice Guys, or The Heat. They’re not trying to deliver gut-busting laughs, but they have solid control of their premise and effectively tell a story with a good amount of laughs in it.
A lot of that does come from the strength of the casting. While Bryce Dallas Howard plays the straight man fairly well and Nick Mohammed does a decent enough job at being a pencil pusher clearly out of his league, Orlando Bloom steals nearly every scene that he’s in. His forced intensity is bizarre, to say the least, but watching him bring out grenades, guns, and knives from seemingly nowhere because he wanted to “be in character” is a level of unhinged madness that we rarely see from Bloom. His intensity is reminiscent of Liam Neeson, just with a bit more madness. I wouldn’t say he’s chewing the scenery, but he gets pretty damn close to chowing down. I didn’t think I wanted to see more of a crazed Orlando Bloom, but I’m here for it.
If it sounds like I’m hyping Deep Cover up as this must-see experience, that’s not really the case. I enjoyed my time with it, sure, but it’s still clearly a mid-budget action-comedy. Many of the sets are dark and frequently reused, and following some of the action scenes isn’t exactly easy given some uninspired and lackluster camera work. Add in some side characters who range from having boring gags, like Kat’s friends who all think that Kat needs an intervention, to side characters that just aren’t funny, like a police officer who never was in the field and has wide-eyed innocence to everything around him, and you have a cast that really only works because of its core trio.
Deep Cover is the kind of film that benefits a lot from the current streaming age. It’s not mindless trash that exists just to pump up subscriber counts or deliver “engagement,” but it’s more like a movie that would have probably failed at the box office being given a chance to reach a wider audience thanks to its availability on Prime Video. It’s a very middle-of-the-road film. Entertaining, but not memorably so. Funny, but not laugh-out-loud funny. Creative in parts, but not in a way that will stick with you. I’d still recommend it to anyone looking for something lighter and reminiscent of comedies from the early to mid-2010s, or anyone who doesn’t have anything better to watch, but that’s not exactly a glowing recommendation now, is it? Great to break up the complex emotions of the Tribeca Film Festival, but if it wasn’t for me being aware of it through the festival, I probably wouldn’t have watched it at all.
