Film Review: Stuber

Sexuality/Nudity Mature
Violence Mature
Vulgarity Mature
Anti-Catholic Philosophy Mature

Stuber is a difficult movie to review not because it was amazingly good or horribly bad.  Instead, it was exceedingly average.  For that reason, it is difficult to be passionate about anything in the movie one way or another.

The movie is about Vic Manning (David Bautista) who is after a very dangerous drug dealer who got away six months earlier.  On the day that he gets Lasik surgery, Vic gets a tip as to a big bust going down.  Since he cannot see, he orders and Uber driven by Stu (Kumail Nanjiani): hence the title: Stuber.  Stu desperately needs a five-star rating or he will lose his Uber job, so he goes along with Vic's increasingly insane demands.  All the while, Stu wants to get together with Becca (Betty Gilpen), with whom he is stuck in the friend-zone.  Vic wants to get his bad guy, but he also wants to make sure his estranged daughter Nicole (Natalie Morales) is kept safe.  Each step of the journey gets crazier and crazier until it all comes to a head.

All of the plot points are fine and by the numbers.  The action sequences are adequate.  The jokes are average, with some clever lines here and there.  But there is nothing about this movie that is very memorable.  

That is a shame, because the cast is actually very good.  Bautista carries the movie a lot more than I was expecting.  He is a brutal action tank, but his line delivery is spot on for the humor.  He also plays Vic like a real, three-dimensional character instead of a bland stereotype.  That doesn't stop him from going extremely hyper-masculine, but Bautista makes it work.  Nanjiani is also very likable in his role of Beta Male, metro-sexual.  He is a great yin to Bautista's yang.  Their completely opposite personalities and physiques give the movie all the energy that it has.  Morales comes off as very cool and grounded.  Gilpen does have strong comedic talents, but is only allowed to show them off a bit in the first act.  Other than that, she is very underused.

The movie wants to say something about Vic's hyper-masculinity, but for the most part it is a commentary on Stu's lack of masculinity.  As Stu gets dragged from horrible situation to horrible situation, he constantly has to dig a little deeper and man up.  Stu tries to get Vic to be a bit more sensitive, especially regarding his daughter, and there is movement here.  Yet it seems strange to me the turnabout.  I try not to let anything outside of the movie enter my review, but I heard a little bit of an interview with Nanjiani about how this movie was going to rip on the narrow ways traditional masculinity is defined.  I took this to mean that Vic would be the butt of most of the humor.  But the final product produced the opposite effect in me.  Vic was brave and driven.  Stu was weak and feckless.  The entire film had me wishing Stu would become more like Vic and not vice versa.

Still, the message did not distract from the movie because I took most of it to be Stu's cowardly ravings.  Director Michale Dowse does an adequate job of telling the story.  The opening action scene offers a nice glimpse into his talents visually, especially in the scene where Vic jumps from a balcony.  But that spark never really builds into a flame in this movie.  Perhaps all involved would have produced a better film with a better script or punchier jokes.  It gets a bit raunchy at times, visiting male strip clubs and the like, but most of the explicitness is in the dialogue.

It wouldn't be a stretch to say that I enjoyed my time in the theater watching Stuber.  I like the actors enough to want to see them in other films.  But the memory of the movie began to fade as soon as the credits rolled.