Deep Cover (2025) review

Detective Billings (Sean Bean) of the Metropolitan Police approaches struggling actress/improv instructor Kat (Bryce Dallas Howard) and asks her to help out catching small time criminals in London, so she brings in two of her students, "serious" actor Marlon (Orlando Bloom) and uncoordinated IT worker Hugh (Nick Mohammed), to join her - at first they investigate the selling of illegal cigarettes and then quickly run into truly dangerous drug dealers  Fly (Paddy Considine) and his boss Metcalfe (Ian McShane).  Although the assembled cast is quite nice - including Sonoya Mizuno as spooky lady assassin Shosh - its sense of humor is aggressively corny (like a mediocre sitcom) and every single component of it is crudely sliced off from other "action pictures" and pasted together into a makeshift creation (and oh yeah, there are klutzy cops in there too).  Even the title itself is taken from Bill Duke's 1992 movie (with Laurence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum) when they could have called it something else, such as Lock, Stock and Three Blithering Idiots.  Or what about The Stand-up Killers?