Netflix original comedies are often a little miss and miss with Adam Sandler’s The Ridiculous Six being the worst of the bunch to-date, but with its latest effort, Special Correspondents, it’s at least making a move in the right direction. It’s not exactly hilarious, but it is entertaining without having too many significant misfires also big the way, so for a low-ish budget TV movie it’s not a shocker.
The biggest positive it has is the onscreen dialogue between co-stars, Ricky Gervais (David Brent: Life On The Road) and Eric Banner (Star Trek (2009)), who tap into the old-school genius of the odd couple setup with a good amount of offbeat charm. Gervais plays luckless and mishap prone radio engineer Ian Finch and Banner plays his confident and successful new radio journalist partner Frank Bonneville.
The duo are thrown together when they’re given an assignment cover a political uprising in Ecuador, but a mix-up with the tickets and passports means that they miss their flight and get locked out of the country when the borders are closed. To get around this, they decide to cover the story from the comfort of New York City, pretending to be in the thick of the action in Ecuador all the while. To make matters worse, Frank manages to inadvertently sleep with Ian’s wife, so there’s more than enough craziness going on to keep your attention.
The rest of the cast are pretty effective with some silly lines from America Ferrera (How To Train Your Dragon 2) as Brigida and Raúl Castillo as Domingo, the Spanish couple who become Frank and Ian’s accomplices by putting them up in the spare room above their cafe. Vera Farmiga (Source Code) is pretty funny as Ian’s wife Eleanor, with a ballsy approach to the villainous wife role and Kelly McDonald (Brave) is sweet as Frank and Ian’s journalist colleague, Claire.
Where Special Correspondents falls down hard is when it needs to behave like a big budget movie when the pair do eventually find themselves in Ecuador in a bid to salvage the situation. The gun fight is woeful to say the least, but even the bar scene where they start to suspect that their in trouble is clunky and staged beyond credulity. Perhaps with a bigger budget, Gervais, who is also the director writer of the film, would have had the time and resources to polish some of the film’s weaker elements.
What the film lacks in finish, it makes up for a little in something that’s at least approaching loveable charm. The characters aren’t the most rounded, but they do have good chemistry, which leads to the film’s best bits. Special Correspondents is worth a watch, but keep your expectations on the more diminutive side of the spectrum before you fire up Netflix to catch it.
Special Correspondents review: 2.9/5
