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The intersection of child-detective literature and a harsh grown-up world is an irresistible concept, and variations have been popping up for years: Brick brought noir into high school hallways, while the underseen remake of Nancy Drew had an anachronistic Nancy navigating a more modern world. Mystery Team, assembled by the five-member comedy troupe Derrick, goes for easier laughs than either of those films, juxtaposing overgrown kids in adolescent bodies (and played, for development further arrested, by twentysomething comics). But it's a good joke, and if Jason, Duncan, and Charlie are tonal variations on the same single comic note, Derrick does a remarkable job of collectively holding the note for most of the film's slightly protracted 105 minutes.
The team stumbles into the seedy mysteries of adult life when a little girl hires them to solve the murder of her parents. Jason, eager to prove himself as a detective and maybe impress - ick! - the girl's older sister Kelly (Aubrey Plaza from Funny People and Parks and Recreation, doing her disaffected monotone thing, to good effect), takes the job over his co-sleuths' objections. The case leads the regressive trio through the dregs of their unnamed small town - convenience stores, lumber yards, grody daytime strip clubs, a drug dealer's basement. The film has a sketch-comedy sensibility, yet it's grounded in a strange sort of believability, evoking the way the town you grew up in can start to seem sketchy and sort of sad, depending on where you look.
Mystery Team was obviously made on a tight budget - even the simplest of stunts look fudged, and sometimes the film has odd pauses, as if the filmmakers needed to leave enough room to make a physical cut directly on the print. Given its technical limitations, though, it's actually a pretty nice-looking picture, shot on film with a strong sense of comic framing: low-key background gags occasionally complement foreground action, and longer takes give the actors time to commit to their characters.
The result is comic alchemy: easy-to-botch comedic ingredients like running gags, oddball side characters, and intermittent gross-outs all work here, assembled into one of the funniest movies of the year (even a foul-mouthed-child bit is hilarious). The writer-performers provide a strong anchor, obviously understanding their own material: Glover channels the childlike energy of his character on the TV series Community into a stunted teenager whose near-insane behavior comes from an innocent place, while Pierson's would-be brainiac has amusing shades of Napoleon Dynamite, only with some gradually revealed self-awareness. The best sketch-based comedies reach a certain level of wholehearted derangement; Mystery Team not only gets there, but finds its way organically.
