Special Correspondents: Lazy Laughs

If you have no Memorial Day plans and are listlessly scrolling through Netflix for entertainment, you might come across Special Correspondents, the latest offering from Ricky Gervais. There's a reason it's a Netflix original movie - it's not something one would venture to a movie theatre for - but it offers some distraction as you go about your household chores.

Eric Bana plays Frank Bonneville (Eric Bana), a news radio journalist for a local New York station. He is skilled at getting the scoop and delivering it with some flash; but he is also sick of being a small-time celebrity and is itching to report on something juicy. When unrest starts brewing in Ecuador, he jumps at the chance to go down there. Unfortunately, intrepid macho journalists can't deliver news reports by themselves. They need a sound technician, and in this case he is to be accompanied by his mousy English colleague, Ian Finch (Ricky Gervais). Due to your standard comedy mishap, Finch loses their travel documents, and the Ecuadorian government issues a travel ban shortly after, so there's no way to enter the country. At which point they realize they work in radio, so as long as they can fake the audio, no one needs to be the wiser about their location. Which leads to them reporting on Ecuador from the Spanish restaurant across the road from the radio station.

It's a funny premise that has a great deal of initial promise. However, things quickly fall apart. The central problem with Special Correspondents is laziness. While the main characters are too lazy and incompetent to actually go to Ecuador, that is reflective of Gervais's own disdain for making too much of an effort in filmmaking. This has worked well for him in television, where his characters are boxed in one location and you have to rely on their inner motivations and desires to breathe life into the story. But in this movie, he is fine with taking two barely realized characters (and even more sketchy supporting characters), tossing them in an improbable plot, and letting the thing boil over without much attempt to make it look good. At no point do you truly root for anyone, and as the movie progresses, you start looking at your watch to see how much more of this story is left to tell.

One of the biggest mistakes Gervais made is casting himself - the rest of the cast features brilliant actors like Bana, Vera Farmiga, and Kelly MacDonald, and they might have managed to make something work out of this thin script. But with Gervais lazily thrown in the mix, making hardly any effort to act (he retains his English accent while Bana and MacDonald are gamely trotting out their best New York impressions), there's no chance this movie will amount to anything.

Special Correspondents might have worked better as a TV show or miniseries. Given the constraints of episodic television, perhaps Gervais would have paid more attention to character development and plot. Then again, it seems like he decided getting rid of the characters and plot via a quick movie was the best solution. It's a lazy movie that can provide some laughs for a lazy weekend, but that's as tepid a recommendation as I can muster.