BEFORE: SNOW DAY! The whole East Coast is getting hammered today, thankfully I don't have to be at either job, and even if I did that event would probably get cancelled or postponed. So we can just hunker down for the day, I can catch up on some TV after I post this. We drove out to Long Island yesterday and had a big meal at a Chinese buffet (the fourth one we've found out there, and we think there are only four) so I didn't even need to eat dinner last night. Going to rest up and prepare to shovel our way out tomorrow - but our bucket of ice melt got all solidified into a big block, possibly due to humidity in our basement. I managed to chip it into a bunch of smaller pieces which I think I can still use tomorrow on the sidewalk. Shoveling snow is a bit of a lost art, and most people don't realize it's all about timing. You don't want to start too early, because then you'll have to do it again, and you don't want to start too late, because then you're breaking the law and also it might freeze and make things impossible. It's kind of like driving on the highway, where everyone who's driving slower than you is an asshole and everyone driving faster than you is a maniac. Anybody who starts shoveling after me is irresponsible and anyone who starts before I do just doesn't know what they're doing.
Sean Bean carries over from "Black Death".
THE PLOT: Three improv actors are asked by the police to go undercover in London's criminal underworld.
AFTER: The idea here is that undercover cops might have trouble impersonating criminals and embedding themselves in a criminal organization, and therefore, quite illogically, the police might turn to improv comedians to do that task. The reasoning is that they're trained to say "Yes" to everything, and therefore you would expect them to do every task assigned to them, and really their mantra is "Yes, and..." which means they would follow up every agreement with some more information that would be designed to keep their story going. OK, so the logic isn't 100% there, really because what they say also would have to be believable, while the secondary goal of the improv comedian would to allow the story to get more and more UN-believable, and therefore funny. So if you think about this too much, you might realize that an improv wouldn't last long in the criminal underworld, especially if they turned the conversation to something outrageous like space aliens invading or pretending they survived a 20-story fall from a building.
But this is what WE have to work with tonight, Hugh is a lonely IT worker for a brokerage firm, and he has trouble socializing with his co-workers, and figures that learning improv comedy might help him break out of his shy shell. Marlon is an unsuccessful "method" actor who has done a few commercials, but can't resist doing too much research and over-developing his characters - improv comedy might teach him to think fast, not obsess over his acting, and just do the job quickly and move on to the next thing. Kat is their improv teacher, and they're recruited by a police Sergeant to do a quick sting operation at a convenience store suspected of illegally selling cheap cigarettes.
They are (somewhat) believable and there is an offer on the table to buy illegal cigarettes, but instead of just taking the recorded evidence they have to Sgt. Billings, they try to work their way up the chain to meet the supplier, and accidentally set themselves up as potential drug dealers trying to make a buy. A mid-level dealer named Fly offers to sell them three bricks of cocaine, but just then an Albanian gang rushes in looking for drugs that were stolen from him, and Kat quickly claims the cocaine and offers to sell it to him as a replacement for what was stolen from him, unaware that she's really selling his own cocaine back to him. Fly is impressed that she negotiated a settlement so quickly, and Billings claims they got farther into a criminal operation in two hours then any previous operative had in two weeks of undercover work.
So, kind of a win all around, and they're asked to keep working for the drug dealer, who sends them out on collections detail, when sent to shake down a retired hitman who owes Fly money, he tries to escape but is hit by a van, and the improv trio takes the money that he owes Fly with them, and also takes credit for killing the deadbeat hitman. They keep failing upward like this for a while, and before long they're hanging out with Fly on his birthday, celebrating at a nightclub - meanwhile a couple detective at another precinct think that the local drug trade has some new players and they open up their own investigation into the three mysterious newcomers who aren't in any police files yet, obviously because they're not real criminals and have no record. Why, it's almost like they don't exist at all!
The three comedians go with Fly to meet his boss, Metcalfe, who figures out pretty quickly that the trio fooled the Albanians, however the Albanians were HIS client, so now they need to find some more cocaine, quickly, and are sent to negotiate with K-Lash, the leader of a street gang. Things do not go well because Marlon can't keep from over-acting like a tough guy, and Sgt. Billings has to rescue them, however he also robs the street gang, which means he's a dirty cop. He also gets killed, and without anyone else knowing their identities, this means the improv comics are stuck undercover, at least until they can find a way out. I suppose they could just hop on a train and leave London, start fresh somewhere else, but that would mean throwing their old lives away. Hey, if it's leave town or get killed by drug gangs who find out you've been working for the police, I'd say leaving town seems like a pretty good idea.
Kat's friends, who saw her out for a night on the town with Fly and his assassin associate, Shosh, decide to stage an intervention - like, they wanted Kat to get out and meet some new people, but then suddenly they don't really like the people that she met. I guess they thought she could meet a nice man like a doctor or lawyer and get into a relationship, not go clubbing with criminals - some people are just never satisfied, you know? Then they have to steal Kat's friend' car so they can dispose of the police sergeant's body - yeah, at this point they might realize that they're in way too deep.
Those other two police detectives finally catch up with them, and are disappointed when they learn that they haven't arrested three new criminal masterminds, but instead three comedians who have only been pretending. Still, it's clear that being so close to crime has led them to do things like cutting up a body and put themselves in one dangerous situation after another. So before Metcalfe can figure out who the link in his organization is, they have to go BACK undercover and try to turn Fly, get him to wear a wire and get the evidence on Metcalfe, the boss at the top of the pyramid. But then even if they succeed, that means that they'll have to go back to their boring pre-undercover lives, which is probably a bit of a relief and also a bit of letdown.
Hugh gets himself out of IT work and opens up a wine shop, though. Good for him.
Directed by Tom Kingsley
Also starring Bryce Dallas Howard (last seen in "Jurassic World: Dominion"), Orlando Bloom (last seen in "Gran Turismo"), Nick Mohammed (last seen in "Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie"), Paddy Considine (last seen in "Heads of State"), Sonoya Mizuno (last seen in "Civil War"), Ian McShane (last heard in "Kung Fu Panda 4"), Ben Ashenden (last seen in "The Bubble"), Alexander Owen (ditto), Leart Dokie, Omid Djalili (last seen in "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms"), Nneka Okoye, Freya Parker (last seen in "Wonka"), Sophie Duker, Susannah Fielding (last seen in "Death on the Nile"), Ania Magliano, Assa Kanoute, Anthony Rotsa (last seen in "The Promise"), Sam C. Wilson, Ben Rufus Green, Sarah Beck Mather, Katy Wix, Mark Davison, Simon Thorp (last seen in "The Fantastic Four: First Steps"), Arthur McBain (last seen in "Napoleon"), Amber Grappy, Terry Bamberger, Nathan Osgood (last seen in "The Current War"), Ewen Weatherburn, Billy Clements (last seen in "Dune: Part Two"), Jacob Bukasa, Daniel Scott-Smith (last seen in "Men in Black: International"), Ahir Shah (also last seen in "Jurassic World: Dominion"), Brona C. Titley (last seen in "How to Lose Friends & Alienate People"), Al Barclay, Hasit Savani, Emma Keele, Judith Street, Vincent Brimble (last seen in "Last Chance Harvey")
RATING: 6 out of 10 broken bottles
No comments:
Post a Comment