Stuber

This is a case of a film that is probably never going to be considered in the best work of anybody who works on it, but never the less it has a couple of minor pleasures. A bit of a throwback buddy comedy (one’s a cop who’s temporarily blinded due to Lasik surgery, one’s an uber driver whose obsession with his 5 star rating is inevitably challenged by the things the cop puts him through), with a combination of violent action and snarky comedy. This is stacked with a reasonably strong cast, though none of them are used at their best – Dave Bautista has shown elsewhere he has a reasonable amount of range and isn’t just your standard issue thug (particularly in Blade Runner 2049), but here he’s standard-issue cop with a dead partner and distant family life. Kamail Nanjiani similarly showed a lot of space to manoeuvre in “The Big Sick” but here he’s largely stuck at whiney passive aggressiveness for most of the film. Natalie Morales, Betty Gilpin, Mira Sorvino and Iko Uwais are all similarly flatly used. Yet there’s a couple of entertaining moments, including one fight in a sporting goods store, that mean that, if this is a timewaster, it’s at least an enjoyable timewaster. No, it absolutely doesn’t get beyond a grossly extended product placement for Uber, and there’s not a lot that’s particularly inventive about the construction of the film. But everybody sets their clichés just on the bearable side of likeable, to get this to the level of passable.