Stubid

Let me give you the basics of Stuber (2019): Kumail Nanjiani is an eager but wimpy Uber driver named Stu. Dave Bautista is a ferocious cop who has had Lasik - so he hires Kumail to drive him around. Hijinks ensue.

Is that it? Pretty much, except the bad guy Bautista is chasing is Iko Uwais. He's a pretty cool villain, but I didn't see as much fancy fighting as you might expect. Actually, the action in this movie is maybe better than it had to be. The comedy, maybe not. There were a few cute scenes where Nanjiani uses his modern skills to help out defeat the bad guys. For instance, instead of physically torturing a captured baddie, he threatens to post embarrassing tweets from his phone. But there just weren't enough of them.

I did like the scene where Nanjiani bonds with a male stripper about his love life. But there is a very similar scene in Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. I don't know if this is an homage or a swipe, or just parallel writing, but I think H&K did it better.

Full disclosure: The Blu-ray disc Netflix sent got stuck around chapter marker 13, and wouldn't start playing again until marker 22. And we just watched it that way. We figure we got the general idea. Maybe we missed something important, but I doubt it.

Not that we hated this. Loved Bautista and the action-comedy stuff. We like Nanjiani, but his character has been done a lot, maybe to death. Hope to see these guys in something better.