Stuber: Stoo-pid

Stuber (2019) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for relentless violence and profanity, sexual candor, and fleeting nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.12.19

Good grief.

I haven’t seen this much contrived, gratuitous and pointless destruction of property since the inane Disney comedies of the 1960s, when a bear would “accidentally” stumble into somebody’s garage and wreak havoc with scores of spilled paint cans.

Stu (Kumail Nanjiani, right) objects strongly when Vic (Dave Bautista) insists on giving a
ride to a dog they've just rescued. Stu should be more tolerant; this pooch is far more
entertaining than most of the rest of the film.

The bear in this case is Dave Bautista’s Vic Manning, a rogue cop with serious anger issues, thanks to a violent, over-the-top prologue dominated by his protracted, dog-nuts fight with gleefully sadistic bad guy Oka Tedjo (Iko Uwais). Alas, the villain gets away, fueling Vic’s rage during six subsequent months of frustrating, futile investigations.

Director Michael Dowse’s Stuber is one of the most uneven action flicks ever unleashed by Hollywood: at times genuinely funny — mostly when Bautista’s hulking Vic trades verbal barbs with Kumail Nanjiani’s meek and mild Stu — and then atrociously violent and/or needlessly vulgar. 

Dowse doesn’t have the faintest idea what sort of movie he’s making, which is no surprise; Tripper Clancy’s clumsy excuse for a script doesn’t give anybody much to work with. Absent Bautista and Nanjiani’s inherent timing and camera presence, this flick would be a total bomb.

Which is a shame. Bautista and Nanjiani aside, Dowse’s lame effort also wastes the time and talent of solid co-stars Natalie Morales, Karen Gillan and Mira Sorvino. This is an abysmally stupid movie, and Clancy’s script is strictly from hunger.

The result is the sort of tasteless, mean-spirited mess that delights in introducing innocent civilians who hang around long enough to make an impression, before being needlessly snuffed.

On top of which, the publicity campaign is quite misleading. The lovably slobbering dog featured so prominently on the poster art has two fleeting scenes, and plays no part in the action.

As the story proper begins, Vic has undergone Lasik surgery, because getting his glasses knocked off contributed to Tedjo’s escape, six months earlier. (Dude: Ever heard of contact lenses???) Alas, this leaves him all but blind for the rest of what turns out to be a seriously crazy day, while his eyes heal.

When Vic gets a lead on Tedjo’s latest drug delivery, scheduled to go down that very evening somewhere in the greater Los Angeles area, he has no choice but to hail an Uber. Enter Stu, the driver in question — get it? Stu + Uber = Stuber — who drives to supplement his dead-end job at a sporting goods store managed by jerkwad boss Richie (Jimmy Tatro). Once Vic gets into Stu’s immaculately maintained electric car, the latter becomes his manic passenger’s eyes, for the duration of their increasingly violent day.

OK, so there’s ample comedy to be mined from the pairing of Bautista’s bull in a china shop, and Nanjiani’s meticulously tidy nebbish; this Mutt ’n’ Jeff pairing has worked ever since Laurel and Hardy. And Nanjiani’s line delivery is never less than hilarious, since his feisty objections are delivered with such a straight face. 

Bautista, giving as good as he gets, maintains the ferocious teddy bear persona he established so successfully as Drax, in the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise.

But the “leads” he follows, having essentially kidnapped Stu as an unwilling companion, make absolutely no sense; the so-called plot is total chaos. Each stop is little more than an excuse for another round of excessively violent fist fights or gun battles.

With a few exceptions. There’s a genuinely funny bit at a gay male strip club, when Stu gets relationship advice from one of the hunky dancers (Steve Howey, shining in a brief performance). Morales also makes the most of her occasional appearances as Vic’s daughter Nicole, who’s tired of being ignored by a father who prefers catching perps to catching her art gallery debut.

Betty Gilpin also is refreshingly “normal,” as Stu’s mildly flighty best friend Becca, for whom he has long carried a silent torch. Naturally, she hasn’t noticed.

Alas, this one-dimensional relationship element is as under-developed and half-baked as everything else in Clancy’s inept storyline.

Further on the negative side, the overly loud gun battles and storefront-shattering melees are bad enough on their own, but become even worse when backed by Joseph Trapanese’s shrieking excuse for a score, which is amplified further by a relentless barrage of equally deafening pop/rock tunes. This film is the epitome of piercing sensory overload.

One imagines Dowse hoped that if everything were loud enough, we’d overlook all the other ways in which this bowser comes up short. He hoped in vain.

Stuber is the sort of low-concept garbage that gives Hollywood a bad name: a package clearly sold on the basis of a 15-word elevator pitch (which likely represented the extent of Clancy’s writing talent).

Stu spends the entire film hoping he’ll somehow salvage a five-star Uber rating out of this chaos, after having endured — during an early montage — a series of one-star reports from insufferable passengers from hell. This mess of a movie earns no better than two stars, solely on the basis of what its two stars bring to the party.

Which is far more than Stuber deserves.