Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Film | June 13, 2025
There’s a quote from a Bryce Dallas Howard interview making the rounds this week where she says she’s never “shocked” when one of her movies fails because “you can always see it coming.” She was referring to Argylle and Lady in the Water, but she might as well have been previewing her latest. Not that Deep Cover, released this week on Prime Video, is aiming for box office glory, but a flop is still a flop. And even if we never see the official streaming numbers, I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that it underperforms, too. “You can always see it coming.”
Directed by Tom Kingsley, mostly known for TV work like This Is Going to Hurt, Doctor Who, and the UK version of Ghosts, the film comes from the writing/producing duo who kept the Jurassic World franchise limping along through the Chris Pratt era: Derek Connelly and the poster boy for failing upwards, Colin Trevorrow. (Trevorrow, lest we forget, was booted from a Star Wars project after the monumental failure of Book of Henry.) Connelly and Trevorrow co-write the film with Ben Ashenden, who had a minor role in Jurassic World: Dominion. Naturally, they also roped in their Jurassic star, Bryce Dallas Howard.
The gang’s all here for what ends up being a spectacularly apathetic action comedy. It’s marginally better than expected, if only because I was expecting something truly awful. The half-baked premise: A struggling improv teacher and two of her equally struggling students are recruited by a police officer (Sean Bean) to infiltrate a criminal drug operation led by Fly (Paddy Considine) and his boss, Metcalfe (Ian McShane).
Two things go without saying: Paddy Considine is excellent, and — minor spoiler — Sean Bean’s character does what Sean Bean characters have been doing since the dawn of cinema. Honestly, it’s the only moment in the film that approaches something like actual comedy.
Most of the film’s problems stem from a script that plays like a five-minute sketch stretched across an hour and fifty minutes. With that much time, you’d think there’d be some effort to develop characters or relationships, but the film never gets past a surface-level setup.
It doesn’t help that the “comedy” is sorely lacking. While it’s tempting to pin that on the decision to cast just one actual comedian — Ted Lasso’s Nick Mohammed — both Bryce Dallas Howard and Orlando Bloom do a decent job with what little they’re given. Bloom plays a method actor whose improv skills spiral wildly out of control — an idea with at least some comic potential — while Howard plays the group’s de facto leader. Mohammed, playing a rigid accountant type with zero improv skills, leans too far into the straight man role, and the character completely fizzles.
The movie itself does the same — fizzles. It ambles from setup to setup, occasionally gesturing toward plot, but never building momentum or tension. Still, it’s not outright terrible, which speaks less to any redeeming quality and more to how aggressively safe it is. It never takes a risk. It never even tries. It’s designed for background noise — something to half-watch while playing Wordle on your phone. Deep Cover isn’t bad enough to hate or good enough to recommend. It’s just … there. A movie-shaped blob occupying digital shelf space, another thumbnail shrugging its way into the algorithm.
