The film's scale problems start with the setup: the film portrays Geoffrey's radio station as a tiny operation with about a dozen employees, and it seems unlikely that he'd devote two of them to on-site coverage in Ecuador. But when the film's comedy is working, those kinds of details don't matter. And for the first 45 minutes or so, Special Correspondents does work well. The opening moves rapidly and energetically, with a Nightcrawler-esque setpiece establishing how Frank lies to get facts on a breaking news story, then spins those facts into sensationalized fiction for his latest news report. Bana has been stuck in grim, humorless roles for most of his career, but he excels here as the kind of merciless egotist Gervais loves to write: the pompous alpha male whose cruelty and self-interest are entertainingly pure and uncompromised. It's a juicy role, and Bana charges straight ahead with it. A comedy just about him and his ambitions would have been tremendous fun.

But Ian complicates things with his sad-sack self-pity and disintegrating marriage, taking the film into a more familiar Gervais self-abasement mode. Ian admits he's covered 25 Tours De France and four Olympics, but always from his New York home base. He hasn't traveled or lived a meaningful life. He didn't expect he'd still be working in radio at age 50. Neither did his status-hungry, monumentally bored wife Eleanor (Vera Farmiga), another brutally uncomplicated comedy type who pulls Frank into bed early in the film, then decides to divorce Ian for not giving her the fame and luxury she somehow expected from a broadcast engineer. Ian's marriage discontent is a non-starter of a subplot, and so is his nascent romance with human wallpaper Claire Maddox (Kelly Macdonald), whose primary function in the film is to be less offensive than Eleanor. But Eleanor herself is a hoot: nakedly greedy, endlessly narcissistic, and completely unashamed. It's impossible to imagine her and Ian getting together in the first place, but she'd be a strong foil for Frank, if the film didn't largely keep them apart.

Still, with Eleanor and Frank as outsized, strong personalities, Gervais playing his usual flaccid-balloon character as the butt of all the jokes (at one point, he describes his body as "25 percent fat, more than some snacks"), and the complicated comic business of the radio-station fakery to keep all the pieces moving, Special Correspondents has everything it needs for some lively humor. And initially, it sparkles, as Frank and Ian escalate their lies to avoid getting caught, and Eleanor takes advantage of their absence to push her own get-rich-quick scheme. And then Gervais suddenly pushes the action to Ecuador, which on this budget looks like it's a five-minute boat ride from Manhattan, and consists entirely of a four-shack village and a dirt road. Bigger subplots open up — Eleanor's plan goes national, Frank's deceptions have international consequences — and the bigger the action gets, the less interest Gervais has in the subplots he's spinning.