Cold War cop spoof a bit light on laughs
“Comrade Detective” was a great idea for an hour-long one-off, or, at best, a more leisurely 90 minutes, but kind of a so-so idea for a six-episode miniseries for Amazon, available on Friday, Aug. 4
I’ve had ideas like this. I bet you did too. They’re the kind of ideas that waft through the distinctively pungent smoke in dorm rooms, usually late at night, with a lot of cold pizza and crushed Cheetos underfoot. What if we made a miniseries about a fake Cold War propaganda film made in 1980s Romania, peopled it with actual Romanian actors, and then had a who’s who of major American actors voice the characters? Wouldn’t that be hilarious? OMG.
With or without medicinal inspiration, that’s what Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka envisioned for “Comrade Detective,” which begins with rogue cop Gregor Anghel
(played by Florin Piersic Jr., voiced by Channing Tatum) and his partner, Nikita Ionescu (Cristian Popa/ Beck Bennett) going off on their own to make a drug bust in Bucharest. It doesn’t end well. The cops are ambushed and Nikita is killed by a guy wearing a Ronald Reagan mask.
Guilt-ridden, Gregor gets a new partner, Iosif Baciu (Corneliu Ulici/ Joseph GordonLevitt), and vows to find Nikita’s killer, the man in the Reagan mask.
Iosif is from the country, which prompts Gregor to make fun of his “milkmaid” wife and suggest Iosif has a proclivity for unnatural relations with goats. But Iosif finds the first and most important clue: a label that says “Jordache” on it.
One of the few running jokes in the mostly humor-challenged spoof is that Gregor pronounces it “Jor-Dacky.”
Among the other voice talents are Kim Basinger, Chloe Sevigny, Nick Offerman, Jenny Slate, Daniel Craig, Bobby Cannavale, Fred Armisen, Mahershala Ali, Debra Winger, Mark Duplass and Bo Burnham, and others.
The hitch is that “Comrade Detective” doesn’t know what it wants to be and works better as simply a standard police procedural. There are some brief moments making fun of American capitalist values, and extolling the thin virtues of life as a Soviet socialist republic, but really, the only laugh line is “Jor-Dacky.”
Neither fish nor fowl, “Comrade Detective” is still modestly enjoyable. The Romanian actors are quite good, and the series has effective, albeit violent, action scenes.
The finale is really over the top, so much so that you watch it thinking this is what Gatewood and Tanaka should have been doing all along.