Kumail Nanjiani drives an Uber, and his customer — a desperate cop played by Dave Bautista — drives him crazy, in this breakneck action comedy.
If not for the wonders of technology — and the world’s most popular ride-sharing app in particular — Vic and Stu never would have met. Vic (Dave Bautista) is an enormous bull-in-a-china-shop-style cop recovering from eye surgery who can’t see well enough to drive (or shoot) on the night of his big bust. Stu (Kumail Nanjiani) is a touchy, easily disconcerted Uber driver who can’t afford to get another one-star review.
And Stuber is the wildly irreverent crash-test action comedy that throws these two polar opposites together for a night of shootouts, stakeouts, and bust-out big laughs, as Vic commandeers Stu’s puny electric car, simultaneously deputizing and endangering its terrified driver, who hates it when you call him ‘Stuber’.
Debuting to justifiably enthusiastic response at the SXSW Film Festival as a work-in-progress screening — though tighter and no less polished than any of the flashy, fully ready studio premieres that screened over the previous five nights — Stuber ought to be a big hit for Fox, provided that some other high-profile movie doesn’t swoop in to exhaust the driver-for-hire gimmick before it arrives. That could happen, considering how chauffeuring stories have become all the rage lately, from five-star offerings Green Book and A Taxi Driver (South Korea’s foreign-language Oscar submission) to lower-end indie entries such as DriverX and Ride. Heck, even Denzel Washington’s Enforcer gave the job a chance in last year’s sequel.
And yet, while countless movies are capitalizing on the fact that Americans feel more comfortable than ever accepting lifts from strangers, the deliciously antagonistic chemistry between Bautista and Nanjiani — who come across as more likely to murder each other than to die at the hands of heavily armed drug dealers — fuels this breakneck buddy movie from director Michael Dowse (Goon).
For anyone tempted to dismiss Stuber as some crass case of product placement, know that Dowse doesn’t hesitate to cross lines in pursuit of a laugh, as he demonstrated in mock doc Fubar, killing off a seemingly indispensable character midway through. With Stuber, he doesn’t pull his punch-lines either, showing a willingness to push the action at least as far as your typical take-no-prisoners Liam Neeson movie. (If Neeson should happen to release an Uber-based revenge movie between now and July, consider the Stuber parade ruined.)
His slick, in-your-face attitude is clear from the opening scene, in which Vic and sharpshooting partner Morris (Karen Gillan) think they’re about to catch the mastermind of a heroin-peddling ring in the penthouse of a posh downtown hotel, but are instead greeted by a series of shotgun blasts. Predictably, Morris won’t make it out alive, though Dowse doesn’t treat the scene as you would expect. Instead, he presents her as the stronger and more level-headed partner during the raid (speaking of raids, the duo’s most dangerous rival is The Raid: Redemption star Iko Uwais), while Bautista takes a beating before finally resorting to a number of improvised wrestling moves — crashing through a wall, lobbing a room-service trolly — that certainly aren’t sanctioned by any police playbook but look convincingly tough on-screen.
After crashing his own car, Vic requests an Uber and gets Stu, whom he strong-arms into driving him around all day as he chases one lead to the next in an ever more dangerous series of stops. Clearly a student of ‘80s-era mismatched-partners movies, a la 48 Hours and Lethal Weapon, screenwriter Tripper Clancy picks an assortment of off-the-wall spots — a strip club, a Sriracha-sauce factory, a veterinary hospital (complete with John Woo-style doves) — for them to visit together, emphasizing the absurdity by having Vic bumble blindly through each location.
It takes a certain finesse to stage such a confrontation in a way that someone as non-threatening as Silicon Valley and The Big Sick star Nanjiani can convincingly hold his own against Bautista (a former WWF fighter who also played Guardians of the Galaxy heavy Drax), and yet Dowse is up to the challenge. Even though the crime plot and villains leave something to be desired, Dowse crams the movie with satisfying fights — both the well-choreographed, knockabout kind and those that consist of nothing more than verbal sparring. Generally speaking, Hollywood comedies seem to be gravitating away from jokes toward more conceptual gags, and yet, Nanjiani knows how to deliver a perfectly timed one-liner, making the character’s zingers sound spontaneous.”
– Courtesy: Variety – Edited for the sake of brevity
