Deep Cover

Deep Cover is about an undercover cop named Russell (Laurence Fishburne (King of New York, The Matrix)) that gets in deep, like real deep.  I mean this movie is called Deep Cover after all.  He’s really a straight laced guy that’s never done drugs and never had a drink.  But he wants to make a difference because his dad was a junkie and a thief.  Poor sonuvabitch got killed right before Russell’s eyes when he was a little boy.  So his superior, Carver (I don’t remember anyone actually saying his name in the movie but that’s what the credits say it is so we’ll go with that, oh and he’s played by Charles Martin Smith (The Buddy Holly Story, Starman)), tells him he can help by taking down the west coast drug cartel.

Russell knows that this is going to turn out to be the biggest mistake of his life and he’s right.  Of course the whole operation starts out simple and routine but soon shit gets outta hand.  Now at this point Russell is undercover as John and that’s what I’ll call him from now on because that’s the name he goes by for pretty much the entire movie.  So John moves up the latter quickly and gets to a point where he needs to start selling drugs for real instead of just turning them over to Carver.  John is making big scores now and Carver can’t just give him thousands and thousands of bills every week so he tells John, “you’re a drug dealer.  Deal drugs”.  Then the hip hop music starts pumping and we cut to a shot of John in a wife beater with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth weighing out coke.  Fucking genius.  This isn’t exactly a hood movie but those kinds of scenes are my favorite in hood movies.

As these undercover movies tend to go, John soon finds that he’s getting in too deep and even starts killing people.  He becomes partners with David (Jeff Goldblum (The Fly, Hideaway)), a lawyer turned drug dealer.  The two of them start to take over a lot of territory and become big shots.  Soon after, they want to muscle out their bosses.  John gets to the point where he can’t remove himself from his cover and Carver tries to bring him in and you know the drill. 

I really like this movie but I have two problems with it.  The first is that the white drug dealers are such weiners.  They all seem miscast and like they’re in a different kind of film than Fishburne is in.  This really comes down to Goldblum because he has the biggest role next to Fishburne.  I guess he’s supposed to be a kinda wimpy guy that becomes this strong drug lord but he wasn’t great.  I just don’t believe that Jeff Goldblum can kick anyone’s ass.

My other complaint is that the ending is fairly anticlimactic.  There’s no big shootout or fight or anything.  You knew what was eventually going to happen and then there it is.  No real surprises or anything that interesting. 

But with that said I can overlook these two things (yea even the lackluster ending) because the rest of the movie is so damn good.  Fishburne is perfect as the confident and dominating lead.  He plays bad guys and good guys both so well that combining them in an undercover cop is no problem for him.  It’s pretty amazing to see him switch back and forth between them so easily.

But what I might like best about this picture is the pacing.  Yea that’s right the pacing man.  The story moves along evenly and quickly so you’re never bored.  There’s no one part that gets dwelled on too long that bogs the whole thing down.  There really isn’t any filler that diverts you from the main story either.  It’s such an easy film to watch.

The director is Bill Duke and I know him as an actor (Predator, Action Jackson).  And he’s fucking badass as fuck but I didn’t realize that he’s a long time director.  He’s done a ton of television and this one is only his second feature.  Duke’s directing gigs are really varied too including doing episodes of The Twilight Zone and Miami Vice and doing movies like A Raisin in the Run, Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, Hoodlum and The Cemetery Club which is described as a “Jewish comedy”.  Hoodlum is really the only other movie of his that I want to check out.

But Deep Cover is cool guys.  Sure it’s similar to The Departed and Donnie Brasco but this is the straight up 90’s version of the undercover cop story.  So all big chains, generic hip hop music and Jeff Golblums aside this is the perfect movie to just throw on and have a good time.