I watched Bad Eggs with the preconception that it was a mix of serious cop drama and comedy. After watching The Late Show and listening to Martin/Molloy, Tony Martin has come to my attention again through his return to the airwaves on MMM. I am catching up on the self-confessed movie buff's interim works by watching Bad Eggs and reading his book Lolly Scramble.
Bob Franklin and Mick Molloy didn't strike me as the two best leading actors for a film, but they perform respectably within the low budget Australian comedy format. The comedy and drama are better integrated than I was expecting, Bad Eggs is basically a tale of two detectives with a capacity for ineptness and clumsiness, who get mixed up in corruption in their own department, the fictional Zero Tolerance Unit of Victoria. There probably actually are individual agencies like this now with a similar lack of transparency, with ASIO recently being expanded and given increased powers. The film gets serious when the two detectives get deeper and deeper in the poo, but the comedic elements return when they strike back with the help of Northey, played by Alan Borough.
On the whole Bad Eggs is akin to a film like True Lies on the comedy scale, it is primarily a drama with comedy arising from storyline elements rather than from deliberately inserted jokes. It never manages to excel in any particular area but what was achieved was a film with a professional look, a storyline that maintains interest for the first 90 minutes, and a cast of fairly decent Australian actors and comedians.
