Stuber: locos al volante

A perfect light evening filler where I laughed a lot. Bautista and Nanjinani worked great together. A movie I would probably watch again, which I can not say a lot these days.

Police detective Vic Manning (Dave Bautista) is obsessed with criminal Oka Tedjo who killed his partner. His boss Angie McHenry (Mira Sorvino) tells him to spend time with his daughter Nicole (Natalie Morales). Stu (Kumail Nanjiani) is a sad sack, obsessed with friend Becca (Betty Gilpin), and stuck in a dead-end job. Vic is having trouble with his vision and hires Uber driver Stu on a dangerous pursuit of the villain Tedjo.

The pairing starts off a little wonky. The premise is also a little wonky. It doesn't make sense that Stu wouldn't simply call the cops or not drive. Over time, the pairing does grow on me. They have some chemistry and Kumail gets more comedic rather than simply being a pathetic whiner. It's a basic odd couple duo on a road-trip police investigation. It's trying to be 48 Hrs but it's not at that level.

There are many reasons to be grateful for movie theater subscription cards, but the biggest one is that I find myself checking out movies I wouldn't normally have gone to see, mainly due to poor marketing. Stuber is the common case of an awful marketing campaign that turned out to be a pretty solid summer buddy film, with two rising stars in Hollywood in Nanjiani & Bautista. It borrows from many buddy-cop classics but their chemistry is enough to put some of the comedy that falls flat over the edge and bring some laugh out loud moments to the forefront. Granted, there were many big comedic scenes that were in the trailer, but that's inevitable in this day and age, and shows you even further how poor the marketing was for the film. It won't make enough money, but I could have definitely gone for more entries into this series with Bautista & Nanjiani.

6.9/10

It wasn't as funny as I thought it was going to be. It still made me laugh though. It had some heartfelt moments also. I wouldn't call this a must see but maybe if you don't mind cheesy comedy and don't take things too seriously it can be enjoyed. It was fun with the fam.

This isn't a bad movie in by any standards but for me it was one of those movies that suffered heavily from the use of over-advertising. There were at least 4 different trailers for this movie including the "red band" trailer so by the time I got around to actually watching the movie I had already heard a lot of the jokes that the film had to offer.

The action scenes were entertaining enough and Iko Uwais did an amazing job with his fight scenes as always. For what it is this movie is enjoyable I just wish they would stop putting all the jokes in the trailers.