Stuber (2019)
Directed by Michael Dowse
After crashing his car, a cop who's recovering from eye surgery recruits an Uber driver to help him catch a heroin dealer. The mismatched pair soon find themselves in for a wild day of stakeouts and shootouts as they encounter the city's seedy side.
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7 films that influenced Stuber
What critics say influenced Stuber
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 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).
Moreover, Stuber plays like a cousin of sorts to Arnold Schwarzenegger's (still terrific) Kindergarten Cop.
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.
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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.
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.
In 2016 we watched as Emma Roberts played a deadly online game from her smartphone in Nerve and last year we saw John Cho look for his missing daughter through her social media accounts in Searching.