Stuber (2019)
A Five-Star Driver Becomes A Five-Star Hero.
It’s a buddy cop movie with a twist - the partner isn’t a cop, but an Uber driver! Get with the times, the future is now! Look, in the mix of things I’ve got slotted this year, I’m doing what I can to try and be more mixed up this year, jumping between different genres - which isn’t to say that we won’t hit a stint where it’s going to be repeat excursions or anything - and in the process the comedy decided to be this week. It looked entertaining by the trailers, so I figured why not? Everyone needs a laugh now and then, and this one looked like if nothing else it should provide some dumb jokes for a good laugh - and you look at that movie poster and tell me that it doesn’t seem like it’s gonna be one weird ride! Tonight, we hook a ride with Stuber.
If I’m honest, which most times I am, this had a lot more action in it than I expected. It also had a lot more scenes not inside the car than I would have expected with the pitch - neither of these are bad things. The story kicks off at the start with a cop loosing his partner, sparking a life-long vendetta towards the criminal who did it for the main character. After this is set up, we jump to our other main character - the mild mannered Stu, whose just out to coast on by in life and maybe if he’s lucky get the girl he’s infatuated with despite her seeming lack of interest in him. After the cop goes in for some eye surgery, however, their fateful paths cross, and Stu ends up going for the ride of his life as the cop chases down his foe with some very poor eyesight.
Yes, it takes a lot of movie liberties - the movie cop mentality of black and white, where gunning down bad guys is the best form of justice when the bad guys don’t want to go quietly. Yes, that might not sit the best in the current world - but you know what? I go to movies to escape the real world, to live in fantasy lands where cars explode if their gas tanks are shot, animals can be fed absurd amounts of drugs and still survive, and the baddies selling their drugs to kids can get shot by a policeman without needing an absurd amount of paperwork to go along with the fact they discharged their gun - let alone take out an entire posse of gun-toting hitmen. Of course, that also speaks to level of realism in the movie - you’ll need to turn off a few things if you want to have the maximum fun with it, and honestly there’s even a bit of Hot Fuzz moments of self-insight towards what it is to help keep it going.
And it’s not the only time there’s references. The movie is loaded with a bunch of them, some big and some small, with varying levels of actual importance to the plot or what’s going on. The characters reacting to it can often end up bridging over into the other part of the movie - the comedy - depending on how things go. Overall, the actors do a pretty good job here - and if you really wanted to go nuts with the thought process you could even say they do a wonderful job of a take on multiple angles of masculinity being put against each other. They deliver even the cheesiest of lines with some heart, and at no time do you really feel that the acting is bad - even if the words might be sounding all sorts of weird. Of course, weird isn’t necessarily bad, but it does sort of have a few of those moments where you just kinda gotta sigh to yourself about it.
Yep, that’s comedy.
Some of that is from the comedy. There’s a bunch in here, and it takes many a different form. You want slapstick? The cop is basically blind the entire movie, constantly stumbling into things. You want someone playing mind warfare by threatening twitter posts about Ryan Gosling movies? Yeah, there’s that in there too. You want moments that are funny because they are unexpected - sure thing, mix it on in! I would argue that most the not slapstick style humor comes from Stu than our Cop, but both do a good job of slapping out some laughs over the run time - even if they aren’t all home runs. Some, dare I say, might even find a few of the jokes offensive - because someone always does. At least a handful of them are certainly not for kids - not that the R rating of the movie shouldn’t already imply that parents should be watching it long before they think a kiddo should.
But the comedy is backed up by the part I was most surprised by - the action. It starts with action, and it keeps action popping up amongst everything throughout. Fight scenes, chase scenes, with or without humor - it’s good. It can be shaky, but they don’t over-cut or make things confusing despite it. There is the staple gun violence of action movies, but as you could probably of guessed from Bautista and his rival (who starred) in The Raid being in it, there’s also some slug-outs and sweet martial moves in there as well. Sometimes the action helps flesh out the story, sometimes it’s just a means of A to B, but it’s a nice touch that it’s more than what I expected when it’s done well.
Effects work is fine. It might not have an absolute crazy amount of stuff to do when it comes to costumes - although surprisingly more so than the normal run of the mill modern movie, what with it’s inclusion of a strip club. Although they might not have incredibly elaborate costumes, they do all have their own look, so it’s quite easy to tell characters apart. When it comes to other elements - gun fights, bullet hits, explosions and car carnage - the team has a bit more to play with and does a wonderful job. Occasionally it’s worked into a joke as well - and yeah, ladies finally get to sit through (well, assuming they haven’t seen a bunch of the stuff I’ve seen) a movie where someone has a dangle out without having any lady-skin being thrown around. Why is that in the effects department section? Oh, you’ll see. Overall, there are a lot of elements to the movie, effects both visual or audio, that end up working their way into relevance in one way or another, even it if it just seems at first like it’s a strange choice to go to a location they are going to.
And references!
I had a lot of fun here. It had far more action than I expected, the acting wasn’t bad, and it had some good jokes in there. Although I did get a few laughs from it, I’d be remiss to not point out that comedy is subjective - if you find the same things as me funny you’d be golden, but you might not have the skew on you humor-wheel as I do. The actors have some nice chemistry, and if you really wanted to dive into it, I bet you could pick out a lot of different conversation topics on there - dangers of relationships, personal image, gender stereotypes. The nice part is mostly all of these little things you could converse about aren’t ground into your nose, so if that’s not your cup of tea you can largely just ignore all of it and enjoy the ride of action and laughs.