Directed By Tim Story

Starring – Eddie Murphy, Pete Davidson, Keke Palmer

The Plot – A routine cash pickup takes a wild turn when two mismatched armored truck drivers, Russell (Murphy) and Travis (Davidson), are ambushed by ruthless criminals led by a savvy mastermind, Zoe (Palmer), with plans that go way beyond the cash cargo. As chaos unfolds around them, the unlikely duo must navigate high-risk danger, clashing personalities, and one very bad day that keeps getting worse.

Rated R for adult language throughout, some sexual references and violence

The Pickup – Official Trailer | Prime Video

POSITIVES

The weakest of scripts are occasionally enhanced by the most magnetizing of personalities, and while “The Pickup” does none of its credible comedians any favors in the creative department for the material, their oozing charisma occasionally elicits a meaningful laugh that at least keeps the atmosphere accessible, enhancing not only the appeal of the engagement, but also the magnitude of these actors to take something derivatively uninspiring, and make it feel freshly appeasing. The best of these is surprisingly Keke Palmer, who in initially being horribly miscast as the movie’s primary antagonist, conjures an abundance of personality to a role reduced to a one-dimensional outline, but even in Murphy and Davidson, Story gives them free reign to occasionally improv through their respective performances, with off-the-wall zaniness in uncomfortable situations that elevates the monotony, whether the veteran director realizes it or not. Davidson is merely a week off of my least favorite performance of the entire year, and it’s strange because he utilizes emotional resonance better in a moment pertaining to a jerk boss more than he ever did throughout a continuous fight for his like, in “The Home”, and while he’s definitely playing second string to Murphy’s warm and endearing insights that commands so much on-screen presence to the engagement, the two share a surprisingly glowing chemistry between them that serves as the proverbial fuel for the movie’s 90-minute excavation, showcasing the trio as being the biggest integral link in the connection to attaining an especially relaxed audience watching at home. Beyond the satisfying leads, the film’s action sequences also carry with them a meaningful balance of urgency and vulnerability during high speed chases, resulting in enthralling devastation that is realized surprisingly with an air of natural authenticity to its undertaking. The sequences themselves aren’t shot especially ambitious or even original when compared to top level action of the current generation, but they do inscribe a refreshing callback to action sequences of the 80’s and 90’s that felt as close to the danger factor as a fictional encompassing could possibly embody, and though they’re sporadically rare in the overall outline of the movie’s duration, they do occasionally remind us of the stakes and circumstances of dealing with so many dangerously unpredictable characters, all the while balancing the tone firmly with the aforementioned comedic material to appraise an appeasing atmosphere that takes itself just seriously enough to not compromise the tension within this road of inevitability. Lastly, while the film’s technical components rarely bare enough of a noticeable influence to the film’s presentation, there are some charming transitions between scenes and sequences from Story that artistically taps into some of the essence of 70’s heist films that the movie borrows so transparently from. This is something that casually persists throughout the film’s duration, but most especially during the opening act, with side-scrolling triple-framed imagery that perfectly captures place and time between three respective sides of characters, all the while exuberating a bit of the tangible tenacity in style that I wish permeated more palpably throughout Story’s ambition, in order to tap into something that made it stand out against a litany of similarly constructed genre predecessors that it falls especially short on.

NEGATIVES

For the second time in as many weeks, Amazon Prime has reminded audiences of the overwhelmingly extensive distance in quality between the silver screen and at-home moviegoing, and while “The Pickup” is far superior to that of “War of the Worlds”, a lot of the same issues unfortunately persist in this lackluster engagement, beginning with the screenplay from Kevin Burrows and Matt Mider, that can’t stay out of its own ways from alienating its audience. While there’s an air of appreciation to the simplicity of a script that never drifts to convoluted circumstances, with regards to tapping into an abundance of unnecessarily convoluted twists, the lack of compelling characterization, an overwhelming amount of plot contrivances, and an underlining element of predictability to the resolutions, establishes a lazy consistency of surface level shallow creativity that constantly kept me from approaching this movie on a deeper level, especially in working against the claustrophobic confines of an aforementioned minimized runtime that allows very little wiggle room to the material. This can be especially realized in everything from suddenly spontaneous character motivations that materialize out of thin air, to a lack of understanding these characters at eye level, without anything that makes them pop beyond single sentence outlines, and while the script is able to maintain the air of urgency that drives the film’s road rage, I was never able to connect to them in ways that I empathized with their situation, serving as the biggest reminder to the film’s constricted coherence that really made it feel forgettable, even before the film was finished. The script also feels absent on arrival with regards to its comedy, without anything in the way of consistent momentum to allow two Saturday Night Live heavyweights like Murphy and Davidson to shine on a grand stage. Considering the film is categorized as being an action -comedy, I never expected the former of that conjunction to be the most dominant to my interpretation, and even in the realization that the movie’s R-rating rarely amounts to anything of effective punchlines within the depths of such lukewarm material, despite the freedom of expression to get as raunchily juvenile and demented as possible, there’s a real auto-piloting factor to a lot of these scenes that undercuts the magnitude of assembling what is otherwise a dream cast of cross-generational comedy, without anything other than a spontaneously egregious response between them to periodically attain laughter. As for the inferior side to the movie’s production, there’s some jarringly abrasive A.D.R to character dialogue that often doesn’t even line up with the lip-synching of the various actors that it spawned from, creating a distracting emphasis to following along with the exposition of its characters, with ratcheted volume levels that even allow scenes where a mouth is obscured to feel overly artificial. Likewise, the glaring surrealness of a United States highway with so very few surrounding automobiles practically screams artificiality and off-camera influence to the integrity of so many of these action sequences, without anything in the way of cinematography that comes close to a daringly ambitious shot to booster some much-needed tension to what’s transpiring. As previously conveyed, the action sequences are stirring enough to invest an audience with commanding practicality, however captured with a lack of proximity to the physical conflict that capitalizes on drama at its most distancing of angles, and the results go about as inconsistent and confrontational as you would expect, with a lack of kinetic energy to the editing and sequencing that outline a inescapable B-movie captivity to the movie’s consistency.

OVERALL
“The Pickup” is another unremarkably mindless action comedy for the straight-to-streaming pile, that not only wastes away the commendable efforts from an A-list ensemble, but also is by and large a painfully unfunny shell of a film that feels assembled by the parts of better genre films before it. Though the action sequences aren’t half bad, they’re too few and far between a shallow screenplay that balances absent characterization with contrivances aplenty, leaving this action vehicle stranded with four flats and a lack of fuel to prepare it for top speed storytelling.

My Grade: 5.1 or D-