Stretch (2014)

Joe Carnahan's Stretch arrives as a limousine ride through one very bad night in Los Angeles, and it wants nothing more than to be a nasty, funny, exhausting piece of business. Patrick Wilson plays the title character, a failed actor turned chauffeur with a gambling debt, a dead man's ghost in his passenger seat, and a millionaire named Roger Karos (Chris Pine, uncredited, unhinged) who promises to settle everything if Stretch simply obeys. What follows is a puerile, demented sprint through sex clubs, prop guns, tow trucks, and the Mexican mafia. The film was pulled from theaters by Universal and dumped onto video on demand, which is the sort of corporate decision that says more about the industry than the movie ever says about anything.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger is nearly blank. The cast is overwhelmingly white, with Shaun Toub as the boss and Ben Bray as a bookmaker providing the only non-white faces, and the film makes no comment on their presence whatsoever. Women exist as love interests and prizes: the ex-girlfriend who leaves for a wealthy athlete, the receptionist who becomes the reward. Bodies are leered at, never affirmed. There is no LGBTQ+ content, no climate concern, no neurodivergent framing, no historical revision to speak of. The villain is a hedonistic, embezzling millionaire, which lends a faint eat-the-rich aroma, though the movie is far more interested in gags about cocaine and severed appendages than in class critique.

As for moral instruction, there is none to be found. This is a film with zero interest in lecturing anyone, which in an era of sermonizing entertainment is almost refreshing. It is juvenile, it is frequently cruel, and it is occasionally funny. We classify it, note the faint traces of progressive sensibility that drift through like exhaust, and move on to the next screening.