Michael Dowse
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Connections, in both directions
Sure, you’ve seen this story before (although all the Uber references are certainly new), and intentionally so, because Stuber gives a big, joyful nod to the films that came before it, from 48 Hours to Rush Hour .
So “Stuber” is kind of buddy-cop movie combined and an odd-couple movie: a cop reluctantly teaming up with a regular Joe, like “Rush Hour” and “48 Hrs.” Vic’s a bull in a china shop, and Stu’s an Indian version of Tony Randall from “The Odd Couple,” except upgraded with millennial-speak and 2019 potent sarcasm, and lots of man-screaming (because Vic does dangerous things).
The plot just described isn’t Rush Hour , it’s director Michael Dowse’ Stuber : An illogical buddy comedy with hopes of confronting toxic masculinity that often swerves to avoid blindly hitting plot holes.
This is a throwback or send-up of interracial buddy-action comedies like Lethal Weapon, 48 Hours and Rush Hour — or even more series iterations of the same idea, such as Anton Fuqua’s Training Day or Michael Mann’s Collateral.
“Stuber” is certainly worth a thought or two for how it fits into the tradition of buddy action movies, those bromances with bullets that include “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “48 Hrs.,” “Bad Boys,” “Rush Hour,” “21 Jump Street” and so forth, ad infinitum.
It is like a mixture of Lethal Weapon meets Rush Hour meets Mr. Magoo .
The over-reliance on cutesy pop-culture references can get in the way of honest conversation, forcing the two to surprisingly interact at a screening of The Princess Bride (because that’s a hip reference right?).
At first, Wallace knows it's foolish to pine after a woman already in a committed relationship, but when he runs into her weeks later (at a screening of "The Princess Bride" no less, perhaps in a sly nod to Rob Reiner) it turns out the flame hasn't been entirely extinguished.
Their second, in a film that nearly overdoses on cute, occurs at a screening of "The Princess Bride" (perhaps a shout-out to "When Harry Met Sally" director Rob Reiner).
What if it all but comes out and brags about that debt by centering an important early scene around The Princess Bride , by WHMS director Rob Reiner?
Later, after both attend a screening of The Princess Bride solo (a little on the nose, granted), the connection grows and the two agree to be friends, although its perfectly obvious that theres more to it than that.
They’re clearly serious, and yet, as she spends more and more time hanging out with Wallace — attending a revival screening of “The Princess Bride,” or noshing on various deep-fried foodstuffs — Chantry finds that she connects with her new friend on a quirky conversational level distinct from any of her other relationships.
Dazed and Confused (1993)
Directed by Richard Linklater
influenced Take Me Home Tonight (2011)
Themes Plot
At times director Michael Dowse and his co-writers Jackie and Jeff Filgo are clearly channeling American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused, films that find both humor and pathos in their characters’ failings and foibles and also notably don’t use their period settings as a source of comedy.
Dowse’s film is so formula that it is aimlessly predictable, borrowing from the likes of “American Graffiti” and “Dazed and Confused.”
Like Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused (1993) and George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973), this is one of those coming-of-age comedies that centers on a single wild night.
Taking place over a 24-hour period during which young graduates confront apprehensions about their future paths in life, Take Me Home Tonight only calls to mind better films such as American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused.
That's the way we've often seen it in movies, notably generational touchstones such as "Dazed and Confused" and "American Graffiti."
It?s one of those all-in-one-night comedies in the spirit of American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused, where the characters gain a lifetime of worldliness in a single night.
The best way to think of “Stuber” is as a comedic take on Michael Mann’s “ Collateral ,” built around the odd couple experience of an innocent driver forced to become chauffeur against his will for an increasingly dangerous and unpredictable client.
It would have been more concise to say that “Stuber” plays like Michael Mann’s “Collateral” reconceived as a rideshare-app commercial, or perhaps as an accidental PSA about police brutality.
Needlessly frantic and foolish, Stuber is convincingly banal in its boisterous attempt to act as the fratboy flipside version of the suspenseful 2004’s Collateral where the Tom Cruise-Jamie Foxx tandem assumed the wheel of intrigue and insanity.
It sounds a bit like Michael Mann’s Collateral reimagined as a comedy, except that Collateral was originally written as a comedy, and then Mann had the good sense to turn it into a thriller, which is one reason why Collateral is a great movie and Stuber, well, isn’t.
This is a throwback or send-up of interracial buddy-action comedies like Lethal Weapon, 48 Hours and Rush Hour — or even more series iterations of the same idea, such as Anton Fuqua’s Training Day or Michael Mann’s Collateral.
A sort of comedic version of Michael Mann’s Collateral, Stuber sends Stu on a wild goose chase around Los Angeles when he picks up Vic (Dave Bautista), a cop with an axe to grind against a drug lord (played by The Raid star Iko Uwais).
When Harry Met Sally... (1989)
Directed by Rob Reiner
influenced What If (2013), Stuber (2019)
Themes Plot
What if this unpersuasive non-chemistry distracts in no way from a generic romcom that owes its themes, though neither its wit nor its insight, to When Harry Met Sally... and its study of how a platonic guyfriend secretly really wants to date his platonic galfriend?
It also speaks more clearly to what the film is about — it’s “The Friend Zone, The Movie.” It’s like a millennial When Harry Met Sally… (a comparison every other reviewer has made, and which every other review to come after will make, but that’s because it’s there, dammit), only one half of the main duo wants something more out of their bond right from the start.
And so we get movies like When Harry Met Sally..., My Best Friend's Wedding and this one, which posit that under every male-female friendship rests a restless libido looking to bust loose with the force of the Alien chestburster.
What If is When Harry Met Sally… for the current generation.
From this moment on, What If takes a page—or, rather, the whole book—from When Harry Met Sally…, repetitiously posing the question about whether men and women can be friends without benefits.
Its commentary on modern life has its moments but, as it nods to The Terminator , Beverly Hills Cop and When Harry Met Sally… , Stuber hopes to emulate the magic of such films, leaning on lazy nostalgia and tired tropes ad nauseum.
Some of his scenes with Alison Pill, whose character's low self-esteem stems from a bit of sleeping around, reminded me of the unbearably moving courtship between innocent cowboy/outlaw John Wayne and newly reformed prostitute Claire Trevor in John Ford's " Stagecoach ."
In a lot of ways I would compare his trajectory with that of Will Gluck’s, a parallel made more relevant due to that director’s work on Friends with Benefits.
But lately Hollywood has been taking a crack at that unique premise with mixed results, most notably with "Friends With Benefits" and "No Strings Attached," both released within months of each other and both not very good.
(It evokes the scene in “Annie Hall” where Woody Allen cooks lobsters at home with his latest date, failing to re-create the same thrill he shared with Diane Keaton.)
(The gag is an updating of one from Arthur Hiller’s “The Lonely Guy,” where it was fresh and better used.)
Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)
Directed by John Hughes
influenced Take Me Home Tonight (2011)
Plot Themes
Directed by Canadian Michael Dowse (“Fubar”) and written by Jackie and Jeff Filgo (“That ’70s Show”), “Take Me Home Tonight” ends up being some weird, occasionally funny iteration of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” the late John Hughes’ “Lawrence of Arabia,” although in this case a vintage Mercedes stands in for a Ferrari.
Ensembles like "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and "Revenge of the Nerds" had deep rosters of young talent, and watching them scrimmage onscreen was one of the pleasures of a mostly disposable film decade.
But throughout that decade, filmmakers like Cameron Crowe, Paul Brickman and John Hughes (okay, to be honest, mostly Hughes) took those simple elements and made them into unforgettable cinematic comfort food movies like Say Anything, Risky Business, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
As for the screwball elements, there is a certain amount of homage paid to classics like Bringing Up Baby and The Thin Man in Wallace and Chantrys banter.
Even "The Scarlet Letter" understood that the most piously bland audience-stand-in Everyman protagonists still need a bit of kink to keep them interesting.
As for the screwball elements, there is a certain amount of homage paid to classics like Bringing Up Baby and The Thin Man in Wallace and Chantrys banter.
Moreover, Stuber plays like a cousin of sorts to Arnold Schwarzenegger's (still terrific) Kindergarten Cop.
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967)
Directed by David Swift
influenced What If (2013)
As if Radcliffe’s very non-Potter-esque roles on the stage (“Equus,” “How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”), in the horror film “The Woman in Black” and as the beat poet Allen Ginsberg in “Kill Your Darlings” hadn’t proved this talented actor’s versatility, a new romantic comedy will again confirm Harry Potter is indeed history.
The first is John Carpenter's "The Thing" and a particularly gruesome scene where an attempt to use a defibrillator results in the loss of two arms, a scene our protagonist, Wallace (Daniel Radcliffe), shows to his young nephew despite being told not to by the boy's mother, his sister.
In the real world, that's a no-brainer — a glance at Facebook reveals that even misogynist brutes manage to have plenty of female buddies — but apparently in Hollywood, it's as fantastic a concept as the ones found in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Eraserhead.
There has to be a place in this increasingly crowded movie landscape for movies like this, or The Nice Guys, or Booksmart – films that are best enjoyed in a theater, with a crowd having a good time without it becoming an Event.
Some have been decent, like The Nice Guys (Gosling-Crowe) and Central Intelligence (Johnson-Hart).
There have been female-driven offerings like The Heat or The Spy Who Dumped Me, stuff that skewed more in the detective comedy direction like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang or The Nice Guys.
The buddy action-comedy has been out of vogue for some time, the most recent example probably being Shane Black’s awesomely entertaining The Nice Guys, but Stuber shows a fine example of how to make an accessible, dumb, R-rated night out with the boys kind of movie that checks all the boxes while even squeezing in a meditation on competing brands of modern masculinity.
In this decade alone entries like The Nice Guys and Central Intelligence have raised serious question about the continued vitality of the style, despite twists to the familiar formula’s central elements.
And this stuff is lame even by the dubious standards of the scrappy-sidekick genre, which includes the likes of Ride Along and The Other Guys .
What “Stuber” reeks of is a script penned in the wake of buddy cop films like 2014’s “Ride Along” and 2010’s “The Other Guys” that stagnated on a studio executive’s shelf until actors could be convinced to sign onto the project and jokes then tailored towards those performers.
Though it can’t be considered revolutionary in the slightest sense, What If is lightweight and hard-to-resist; it's a throwback to classic romantic comedies such as The Apartment, When Harry Met Sally, and Sleepless In Seattle.