Eddie Murphy Wearily Leads a Fitful Action Comedy
??A wheel almost literally comes off the armored truck where much of the action and most of the comedy takes place in Tim Story‘s action-comedy “The Pickup” (a rather confusing name considering that’s another type of truck altogether). It’s early enough in the proceedings, so a quick repair makes the van roadworthy again. But sadly, no such fix exists for this ungainly star vehicle’s metaphorical wheels which, as the plot squeals around yet another credulity-defying twist, are soon flying off in all directions leaving the movie careening wildly across the freeway, gears grinding, axles sparking, while a checked-out Eddie Murphy and an overcompensatingly antic Pete Davidson strap in, grimly trying to gin up some buddy chemistry.
Murphy and Davidson play armored truck guards — veteran Russell and rookie Travis, respectively — thrown together on this particular day by circumstance and their mean-mannered boss Clark (Andrew Dice Clay). Clark sneers over Russell’s protestations that he needs to get home to his comely wife Natalie (Eva Longoria) in time to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary, and assigns him an unfamiliar, long-haul route. Worse still, he saddles him with noob Travis, who is not only a bit of an idiot, he is in irritating high spirits having spent the weekend engaging in mindblowing sex with the beautiful Zoe (Keke Palmer). This is despite Travis having initially pulled his gun on Zoe, threatening her with arrest when he mistakes her come-on for an attempt to rob a bank. And so the gawky goofball has basically won some enormously unlikely sexual/romantic lottery, which never happens to anybody in real life, except maybe to Pete Davidson, so perhaps we can let this one slide.
Still, the trope of Ordinary Joes scoring women way out of their league does have a kind of throwback vibe, and it’s frankly a shame that the rest of “The Pickup” doesn’t follow suit. But instead of emulating the Murphy buddy-movie heyday and capitalizing on the megastar’s inimitable motormouth bravado (punctuated with that iconic goose-honk laugh), “The Pickup” makes the baffling decision to cast Murphy — who also produces so one presumes he had some say — as the stolid, exasperated straight man to Davidson’s live-wire lunk. Cue a bunch of tired back-pain and flip-phone wisecracks, and even they only come when Russell runs out of pointed silences, suppressed eyerolls and mute paternal-disappointment looks to cast his partner’s way. Even at 64, Murphy is too young to be getting too old for this shit.
For his part, Travis yammers and jibbers and cries about wanting, and failing, to be a cop, in between juvenile jokes about scatology or sex. Kevin Burrows and Matt Mider’s screenplay doesn’t provide Davidson with a lot to work with, so as the old Hollywood adage goes, when your script gives you lemons, make a joke about blowjobs — at least that way you can earn the R-rating that will give your otherwise mild and inoffensive action-comedy a veneer of bad-boy edginess.
Story is the experienced filmmaker behind “Barbershop,” “Ride Along” and the Jessica Alba-era “Fantastic Four” movies. And “The Pickup” certainly has a professional sheen, even if the freeways tend to be suspiciously empty of other traffic whenever a chase ensues, and even if a lot of the psychology demonstrated is so contrived as to be barely recognizable as human. But it all takes place as though through the wrong end of a telescope, flattened-out, far away, and more notable for all the ways Murphy’s presence reminds us of what is absent.
If anyone here is a candidate to fill that gap, in terms of getting close to the energy, inventiveness and offbeat cadences of Murphy in his prime, it’s not Davidson but Palmer, whose Zoe soon resurfaces as the heist mastermind. Her motives are a lot more right-on (and give the film a faint blush of anti-capitalist, screw-The-Man credibility) than those of her meathead henchmen, whom she ditches when she realizes she can simply manipulate Russell and Travis, aka Harmless and Gormless, into doing her bidding instead. The mystery of why she seduced self-confessed loser Travis is now solved — it was for insider information — though the mystery of why she also kinda fell for such a doofus remains.
In any case, Palmer is so naturally funny given nothing much to play, one marvels at the thought of what she could have done had the screenplay actually given her some jokes. Ditto Longoria, whose part is smaller but who makes abundant comic hay in her brief moments of sunshine, even if nothing quite manages to be funnier than the notion that this alpha female’s greatest ambition in the world is to settle down with her lifer security-guard husband and open a B&B. Axel Foley and a Desperate Housewife running a chintzy New Jersey inn? Now that, more than most of “The Pickup,” is comedy.
