Stuber Parent Guide

Following the murder of his partner, Detective Vic Manning (Dave Bautista) is out for vengeance. His target: notorious drug dealer (now cop killer) Oka Teijo (Iko Uwais) and his gang. The good news for Vic is that one of his informants has tipped him off that there’s going to be a huge drug drop later that night. The bad news is that Vic is still recovering from laser eye surgery and can’t see well enough to drive. So he does what anyone else would do when they need a ride: he calls a rideshare service. Stu (Kumail Nanjiani) swings by to get him and immediately falls down a rabbit hole of drugs, violence, and personal danger for which the store clerk cum driver is totally unprepared. Will Stu and Vic manage to work together to stay alive and solve the case? Or will their warring personalities lead one of them to kill the other before the criminals get the chance?

This movie is… rough. The first problem is that the pacing is awful and this movie drags like someone shot out the back tires after the first fifteen minutes or so. It makes the brief 93 minute runtime feel almost half an hour longer. Another problem is the choreography and cinematography for the fistfights, which is blurry and cut too quickly, meaning those long fight scenes are mostly a confusing (and faintly nauseating) expedition into shaky camera work and sloppy editing.

What’s worse, though, is the writing. A dumb action movie or fast-paced thriller can get by with some clichés, but this plot is composed almost entirely of worn out tropes. And this isn’t an action movie, or anything approaching a thriller: this is primarily a comedy, and that’s where it fails catastrophically. Nothing is more pathetic than an unfunny comedy: it’s like watching a clown jump off a bridge. Watching actors try to sell bad jokes to an uninterested audience isn’t just boring- it’s actively unpleasant. It triggers that cringe response you get when someone starts telling risqué jokes in front of grandma at Thanksgiving.

The problems with this film don’t stop with the poor structure and execution. The biggest content issue with this 90 minute death march is the profanity, which is near constant. It seems like the brain trust behind the film thought that even if the jokes didn’t land, some good, old-fashioned cussing would bail it out. Not so. With a minimum of 50 sexual expletives, Stuber is clearly not trying to toe the line on that “R” rating. Add to that the casual violence, heavy sexual references, and brief nudity, and you can rest assured that the movie doesn’t really mind if it makes you uncomfortable.

At the end of the day, though, Stuber’s biggest problem isn’t the swearing, or the trope-heavy script, or the lame jokes, it’s that the movie is simply slow and boring. It’s a bad sign when a summer action-comedy leaves teenage boys saying (as I overheard while the credits rolled) “I could have waited for that to hit Netflix”. That level of audience apathy says more about this film than anything else. I guess I could have just written that, but that makes for a pretty short review. If only the movie had felt so brief…