Gervais’ ‘Special’ has its moments
Ricky Gervais is at his best when he goes so over the top, it makes us nervous to watch him.
No one’s going to be nervous watching Gervais as the sad-sack co-star of “Special Correspondents,” a new Netflix film comedy written and directed by the star of the original BBC “The Office” and available for streaming on Friday.
Still, a tepid Gervais is better than no Gervais at all, and “Special Correspondents” has its moments, most of which are supplied by supporting cast members, including America Ferrera and Vera Farmiga.
The story is pure “Wag the Dog,” or, in this case, probably “Wag El Perro,” as news-radio hotshot Frank Bonneville (Eric Bana) and his shlumpy sound engineer, Ian Finch (Gervais), are dispatched by their boss Geoffrey Mallard (Kevin Pollak) to Ecuador to cover a rebel uprising.
Unfortunately, Ian unintentionally discards their tickets, passports and money on the way to the airport. Now what? If they go back to Mallard with the truth, they’ll both lose their jobs. Instead, they set themselves up in the room above a restaurant owned by a Latino couple named Brigida and Domingo (Ferrera and Raul Castillo) and fake their broadcasts with appropriate sound effects crafted by Ian.
At one point, they need some authentic-sounding voices to shout in Spanish to convince their listeners that they’re in the thick of the revolution. Raul shouts, “Julio Iglesias!”
Viva la revolucion y “Quiereme Mucho.”
The high comedic point of the film comes when Ian’s vainglorious shrew of a wife, Eleanor (Farmiga), sees a chance to capitalize on her husband’s apparent disappearance in Ecuador and launches a charity by performing a song she wrote herself called “Can You Spare a Dollar for a Hero?”
Bana is the straight man of the central comic duo, of course, but though Gervais occasionally reminds us of why he can be the funniest loser in entertainment, his performance has hills rather than actual peaks, and far too few of them.
Although the eventual outcome of the story is never in much doubt, and Gervais more or less phones it in, the film has some nice performances and a handful of legitimately funny moments. Gervais’ writing is occasionally adequate, but his direction is way off. Instead of being paced like a screwball farce, “Correspondents” mostly just shuffles along for about an hour and a half.