Movie Review: Stuber

Along with its fellow new release last weekend Crawl, Stuber represents a box office anomaly. Original titles with relatively low budgets (both Stuber and Crawl cost less than $20 million to make) and R-ratings are usually relegated to the bowels of August when Hollywood is primarily in pre-awards season dump mode, if they receive a summer release at all. Also like Crawl, Stuber is a solid piece of vintage popcorn entertainment that benefits from being unlike anything else currently occupying multiplexes.

Following in the footsteps of the adult-aimed buddy action comedies (The Hitman's Bodyguard, The Spy Who Dumped Me) that hit theaters during the past two summers, Stuber hits its peak when the bullets and fists are flying. The combination of a script that conceived some truly wild fight scenes, a pair of charismatic leads (Kumail Nanjiani, Dave Bautista) that are down for anything and a director in Michael Dowse (Goon, What If?) that wraps all of this wall-to-wall lunacy into an exciting, streamlined package serves as a beautiful foundation for a good action movie. There's an energy, exuberance and almost improvisational quality in the way the characters use the environment to aid them that allows these increasingly absurd showdowns (a pair of sequences in an animal hospital and sporting goods store are particularly great) to really sing. The only lapse in judgement the filmmakers made when constructing these action scenes was severely underutilizing Iko Uwais- who portrays the illusive drug lord the protagonists are pursing throughout the movie. A freewheeling playground like the one Stuber establishes would've been the perfect place to repeatedly unleash his unreal martial arts talents and leaving him on the sidelines for 95% of the runtime prevents this from having the best pure action sequences of 2019 so far that weren't in John Wick: Chapter 3.  

Despite a solid effort from the well-matched Nanijani and Bautista to elevate the material at every turn, the level of wit present in the action scenes mostly doesn't translate to the more traditional jokes. The bulk of the humor outside of the fight scenes consists of predictable jabs about the conflicting archetypes these two men conveniently fit (tough guy vs. sensitive guy) -which last month's similarly constructed Shaft somehow managed to do a much better job with. I get that it was trying to satirize toxic masculinity (or something along those lines), but the writing isn't sharp or consistently funny enough to make these attempts at conveying a message stick. While Stuber manages to work pretty well in spite of its mediocre jokes and incoherent social commentary, it's still a bit disappointing that writer Tripper Clancy couldn't make better use of the strong comedic dynamic that he was fortunate enough to have heading this project.

Anybody that's looking for a serviceable buddy movie with some laughs and cool action should give Stuber a watch. It may not be a 5-star ride, but it got me where I needed to go without any serious detours-which is really all I want/need to be satisfied most days.          

Grade: B