Tribeca 2025 Review: DEEP COVER, Stumbling, Bumbling, and Improvising

Think fast! ... If only.

Deep Cover (2025)
The film enjoyed its international premiere at Tribeca 2025. It is now streaming on Prime Video.

An easy-going comic action picture that falls flat more often than not, Deep Cover resembles its own sketchy, improv-comedy premise.

Bryce Dallas Howard stars as a struggling actress in Britain whose visa is expiring soon. She's spent years in country, with scant success in landing roles, so she funnels most of her energy into teaching an improv-comedy class at a local club. It is there that she meets up with another struggling actor (Orlando Bloom) and a corporate IT worker (Nick Mohammed) who yearns for something different.

On the night they meet, a police officer (Sean Bean) is in the audience, and recruits them for an undercover assignment, where they cross paths with a drug lord's underling (Paddy Considine) and his deadly associate (Sonoya Mizuno). The relative success of the assignment prompts the police officer to send the bumbling neophytes into "deep cover."

From the outset, it's crystal clear that there is something fishy about Sean Bean; he works by himself, completely alone in a warehouse, far from police headquarters or any police colleagues. It beggars belief that anyone would be suckered into what he proposes, but the lead trio are set up as such stumbling, bumbling idiots that the premise demands that they be as gullible as possible.

Buying into the premise completely, though, means that the comedy and the action needs to rise to the level of pleasant distraction at best. As charming and likable as the lead actors aim to be -- and they are -- the characters they are playing are wafer thin and don't leave them much to do after the premise is established. The lackluster action, such as it is, feels welded onto the wan comedy framework as a means to extend the running time.

Ben Ashendon and Alexander Owen, who co-wrote the script along with the team of Derek Connelly and Colin Trevorrow, appear as a bumbling pair of detectives, and one could only wish that their storyline had received greater prominence in the narrative, which might have saved the film as a whole. As it is, they only appear sporadically and do not have enough time to right a sinking ship.

For dedicated fans of Bryce Dallas Howard and Orlando Bloom, the film provides an enjoyable reminder of other, better roles they have essayed. Otherwise, it's yet another decent-looking, occasionally amusing, low-energy feature on a streaming service.