Mystery Team

Jason, Duncan and Charlie became the neighbourhood detectives when they were seven, finding lost cats and lifting fingerprints off cake. They are eighteen now and still doing the same job. When a small girl knocks on their door and says her parents have been murdered, they enter a real homicide for the first time, and none of their methods work. Dan Eckman directs. Donald Glover plays Jason, DC Pierson plays Duncan and Dominic Dierkes plays Charlie. The people who made it were an internet comedy group called Derrick Comedy. The audience the group had built on YouTube financed the film independently, and it screened at the 2009 Sundance film festival, one of the first examples of the move from the internet into cinema. Donald Glover went to the series Community shortly after this, and was later known for Atlanta and, in music, as Childish Gambino. The comedy comes from a mismatch of timing: the child detective template is dropped into an adult crime world and the characters do not notice. Its limit is the budget. The image is flat, the second half sags, and some of the jokes are cruder than they need to be. Who it is for: viewers who like two thousands internet comedy and genre parody. Who it is not for: the humour plays a very particular vein, the film feels long if it does not land, and the violence sits badly against the comic tone.