Really well made thriller with top form Fishburne and Goldblum
“Deep Cover” may be just another urban drugs-are-bad action film but at its center is a pairing of stars so mismatched that part of the fun is seeing just how they gel together. That would be Laurence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum.
Fishburne plays a cop named John given an undercover assignment to infiltrate a hierarchy of drug dealers. His temperament is said to be perfect for the job, yet being around drugs and selling them has a profound effect on his identity.
As a boy he witnessed his father not only get heavily addicted to crack but die in a robbery trying to get money to buy more. From that point he decided to walk the straight and narrow and be seen primarily as the good guy.
At first I thought this was getting into similar territory of another fantastic undercover film called “Rush” with Jason Patric and Jennifer Jason Leigh. But this is less about a newbie succumbing to addiction and more about a man in moral quandary.
John will be forced to sell to people he knows he’s hurting. He will be forced to kill those he was sworn to protect and then he’ll also have to wrap his head around how those killings can be seen as justified for the greater good later.
He will also be partnered up with a mid-level distributor, the lone Jew in this mostly Latin American crew, David Jason (Goldblum). Jason seems the average suburbanite except he also has peculiar kinks, sleazy picadillos, and dreams toward starting a designer drug empire of his own.
John uses him to climb the ranks, Jason uses him to reach his own ends. On the side is also Charles Martin Smith’s Federal Agent running Fishburne, a perfect representation of the government’s disingenuousness when it says “war on drugs”.
It’s an action film that carries all the hallmarks of the genre- car chases, dirty cops, bloody beatings, killings, reprisals, and morality speeches. But then it’s also smart enough to know there are no white hat here- the motivation is never about saving people as much as it’s about power and money.
And Fishburne is really good at playing the bind, not just as someone who keeps weighing the morality of his actions but also learning that the system is so fucked up that to do good, he’ll need to do some pretty bad things.
Accompanying him is Goldblum, giving another one of his off-kilter turns as a man who always seems enthusiastically high, even when he’s killing someone or asking them about their sex lives. He brings an eccentric carelessness to this villain that goes from psychotic to hilarious in equal stretches.
Director Bill Duke also makes the film a nice mix of blaxploitation thriller and noir crime thriller- combining his urban crime film with a running narration, a strong moral complexity, and sex scenes that are stylish and seductive.
It may be a bit too close to other urban thrillers like “New Jack City” but you walk away from “Deep Cover” at least feeling like it has a morality all its own..that and also one heck of a pairing in Fishburne and Goldblum.