Special Correspondents (2016)

Directed by: Ricky Gervais | 101 minutes | comedy | Actors: Ricky Gervais, Eric Bana, Vera Farmiga, Kelly Macdonald, Kevin Pollak, America Ferrera, Raúl Castillo, Benjamin Bratt, Kim Ramirez, Jim Norton, Jonathan Langdon, Glen Grant, Duane Murray

Albert Finch is a sound engineer at a local radio station in New York. Together with the brutal journalist Frank Bonneville, he reports on events in the streets of New York. Then unexpectedly comes the news that an uprising has broken out in Ecuador. Though far from New York, the radio station sees opportunities for the star reporter and his sound engineer. But before the flight to Ecuador, Finch loses the tickets and the passports. What then? In hopes of blessing, the two set up their own sound studio, and from there they pretend to beat the coup in Ecuador.

Does this plot sound familiar to you? Then you can knock twice. Evelyn Waugh already wrote about a correspondent who covered the war far from the front in the satirical novel ‘Scoop’ from 1939. But the real inspiration for ‘Special Correspondents’ is the French comedy ‘Envoyés Très Spéciaux’ (2009). Besides a remake, ‘Special Correspondents’ is mainly a film by Ricky Gervais (‘The Office’, ‘Extras’). The English comedian plays a well-known version of himself here, but in a New York setting.

The latter doesn’t seem to work at all. Gervais is too English and (above all) too much himself to blend believably with the streets of New York and the American characters. But the other characters don’t seem quite out of place either. Vera Farmiga plays an opportunistic wife who has ended up in the wrong comedy, Eric Bana seems to have walked away from an action movie and poor Kelly Macdonald plays a deadly serious character who has absolutely nothing to do here.

These fine actors were also not lucky with the screenplay. The story hangs together like loose sand, the humor is exhausting, the sentimental scenes never catch on and there is an hour and a half long lifeless vibe about the whole. Even more annoying is that the pranks our cunning duo pulls are actually quite painful. A faked hostage-taking in Ecuador can be funny, as long as we are not confronted with the affected environment (which is also played dead serious).

What Ricky Gervais had in mind when he created this stale satire, we’ll never know. But three years after ‘Special Correspondents’, with the series ‘After Life’ he made another comic work about a local journalist, now situated in a dull English seaside resort. The series does everything right that completely fails here.