Stuber (2019)

There’s a weird offshoot of the “Buddy Cop” comedy genre that devolved into “not buddies, only one cop” and the comedy part is optional (a google search revealed that this category is officially labeled ‘mismatched partners’). You can see examples of this in “Central Intelligence” (2016) and “The Bounty Hunter” (2010) - movies where a law enforcement officer commandeers an unwilling civilian to help solve the case of the day. They start with the characters being at odds and the civilian being understandably terrified, and ends with the case closed, the protagonists as friends, and the civilian with some undefined new appreciation for the police force or whatever. If the leads are opposite genders, there’s automatically a romantic angle involved.

Which leads me to today’s flick:
“Stuber” (2019) has the unfortunate fate of being one of those moves, with my concluding though being “why did this get made?” 

Police officer Vic Manning (Dave Bautista) lost his partner to a drug dealer somewhere in L.A., explicitly because he lost his coke-bottle glasses somewhere during a gun fight and thus couldn’t shoot the perp.
Sometime later, he got laser eye surgery on what happened to be the same day he finally got a lead on the case.
So he did what any reasonable person would do: kidnap an Uber driver and force them  to do his bidding as he bumbled around L.A. for approximately 18 hours, conveniently finding people and clues that pushed the plot forward, because the plot needed to move, not because he had any right to be successful on his own merits.

Meanwhile, Stu (Kumail Nanjiani) was a loser. He worked at a sporting goods store for a boss who treated him like crap but he wouldn’t stand up to, fawning over a woman for whom he was a doormat, and working a second job as an Uber driver. 
I’m not trying to rip on Uber drivers - it’s a service I use and appreciate. But as a character, Stu’s role as an Uber driver was clearly designed to display his life failings.

Anyway.
Vic happened to get into Stu’s car as it was conveniently puttering outside his house, then followed the generic plot line I listed above, with Vic consistently being a horrible, abusive cop and Stu just... taking it.
The obvious answer to my next statement is “because the plot called for it,” but I cannot fathom why Stu wouldn’t call 911 and ask why a clearly deranged officer was screaming orders at him from the passenger seat.

As part of Stu and Vic finding common ground in their character development, there was an unnecessarily long scene of them fighting in Stu’s place of work, hitting each other with tennis rackets and golf clubs and bicycles. It was the kind of thing that would be hilarious in, say, Looney Toons, but would have caused serious long-term damage to both of them, regardless of how muscled Vic was.
I get that movies like to use this trope, as borderline indestructible characters can make for an interesting tale (see my review for “John Wick 3”), but it also requires an internal consistency rule: if Vic and Stu could survive hitting each other with aluminum bats for an extended period (read: more than once), then people who got hit by cars should have been able to walk away no problem, and gunshot wounds should never be more than a mild inconvenience.

The A-plot was about Vic and Stu becoming friends (I think?), while the B-plot was about Vic finding the drug dealer.
Turns out the drug dealer was working with a mole in the police department!
And... I don’t care.
No part of that plot twist felt important. It was shown with a minor dramatic reveal and I felt nothing, and when that thread was wrapped up, nothing came of it, no part of the plot actually relied on it. It must have been thrown into the script at the last minute, because it clearly wasn’t important to the actual story.
There was a C-plot about Vic’s broken relationship with his adult daughter. Me telling you that it was there holds about the same story impact and emotional weight as that actual plot thread.

Weirdly, despite the title of the movie literally including the word “Uber,” this didn’t feel like an extended commercial for the company. 
Or if that’s what it was supposed to be, they did a terrible job.

And while we’re on that topic: Did you guess that the title of this movie was a portmanteau of Stu’s name and the gig-economy company’s name? 
No?
Of course you didn’t, because it’s a stupid title based on one unfunny throwaway line from Stu’s abusive boss about 15 minutes before the movie ended. 
I spent most of the movie wondering why Stu kept getting called “Stuber,” and then got mad when it was revealed: it was so pointlessly inconsequential and irrelevant to the movie. It’s not a nickname that Stu got during the adventure, or an honorific that Vic gave Stu at the end as a joking thank-you for driving him all over town. 
It’s like the director day-dreamed the word “stuber” into existence, then decided to write a movie around it.

This was rated R, because someone wanted to show a completely naked man, have the characters drop the f-bomb a bunch of times, and display some abnormally bloody shoot-outs. While blood and shoot-outs don’t bother me (again: “John Wick 3”), those included here felt particularly graphic, like the director wanted to really eek out every “adult” drop of that R rating, as if the full-frontal floppy phallus hadn’t already gotten them there. I wish there was some way to rate a movie for being “painfully unfunny.”

I don’t actually know if Bautista and Nanjiani are funny, or if they ever really were. 
In his role as ‘Drax’ from “Guardians of the Galaxy” (2014), Bautista’s stunted, ridiculous dialog was hilarious becausehe was supposed to be an alien warrior who relied on his muscles and not his brain. Nanjiani’s character of ‘Dinesh’ in “Silicone Valley” was fantastic across from Martin Starr’s ‘Guilfoyle,’ but his animated fever dream of a character ‘Pawny’ in “Men In Black: International” (2019) was only on the teetering edge of mildly funny. 
So... are these two actors that are actually bankable in any way, or are they riding their coattails from past successes as supporting actors?
After watching the cinematic equivalent of earthworms dying on the sidewalk after a storm, I’m betting it’s the latter.

I endured this mess for three 30-minute sessions on the treadmill because I needed a distraction from an exercise that is only slightly evolved from an old-timey prison torture device.
The movie added to that pain.
I can not recommend this to anyone for any reason.