The pairing of a tough cop with a hapless comedian is a Hollywood staple, but director Michael Dowse spins it here by pairing cringey, painful violence against poor Dave Bautista with Kumail Nanjiani’s bone-dry humour as his put-upon Uber driver.
We open with Bautista’s LAPD detective Vic facing off against Iko Uwais’ barely sketched villain, setting up an obsessive quest for the tough cop. It’s all deeply gloomy until Nanjiani’s Stu turns up. He’s a store clerk moonlighting as an Uber driver while he also sets up a business with his long-term crush Becca (Betty Gilpin). When a temporarily blinded Vic becomes his passenger, the driving go-getter endures shoot-outs and the obligatory stop at a strip club (albeit with an effective twist) before he can hope for the five-star rating he desperately needs.
There’s a dystopian tinge in the fact that Stu feels compelled to risk his life for his rating, but it’s drowned out by the film’s endless shilling for the ride-sharing service. Vic is essentially Drax with a few more lines, and Bautista doesn’t always seem terribly comfortable when he reaches for greater nuance – which is a shame, because he’s a likeable guy in the right role. Ironically it falls to Nanjiani to do much of the heavy lifting, dramatically speaking, while his larger colleague simply punches people and squints hard. The film never slows enough to allow them a chance at a real bond, but they manage some friendly chemistry despite that, inbetween the painful-looking, wince-inducing injuries and one-liners.
