Stuber (2019)

The buddy cop picture has, over four decades, survived every conceivable pairing of temperament and body mass, and Stuber arrives to test the formula one more time with a Los Angeles detective who has just had laser eye surgery and an Uber driver who is very worried about his star rating. The film knows its central joke: two men trapped in a sedan, one of them bleeding, the other refreshing the app. There is a certain grim poetry in watching a man negotiate a $5,534.95 fare while gunfire erupts outside, and the movie glances at the gig economy the way a passenger glances at a bill. It does not linger.

Kumail Nanjiani co-leads as Stu, and his casting is presented without ceremony, which is the film's preferred method. The picture is content to let a Pakistani-American man carry half of a mainstream action comedy and then never mention it again, apart from a name joke or two. Natalie Morales, Mira Sorvino, Betty Gilpin and Karen Gillan populate the margins as professionals who mostly get on with their jobs. Stu does scold his passenger about toxic masculinity and about the way he treats his sculptor daughter, and these scoldings land between car chases with the thud of a man reading from a pamphlet he has not finished. The moralizing is real but shallow, a lecture delivered while dodging a bullet.

The film has no interest in climate, no interest in bodies as anything but obstacles, no interest in the neurodivergent, and no historical record it wishes to correct. It gestures at wealth and the app economy and then apologizes for the gesture. What remains is a moderately amusing mismatched-cop exercise, competently assembled, faintly self-satisfied, and entirely convinced that a five-star review is the highest moral good available to man.