During a raid, LAPD Detective Vic tries to arrest criminal Teijo, but the latter kills his partner, Morris. Six months later, Vic has underwent a laser eye surgery, but then gets a tip that Teijo is going to have a smuggling operation this evening. Since he cannot see that well from the surgery, Vic hires Uber driver Stu to drive him from house to house, in order to arrest Teijo's henchman. This overlong crime chase is very inconvenient for Stu, since he planned to try to woo a girl he always liked. In the showdown, it turns out Vic's boss, Captain Angie, is the police mole who is on Teijo's payroll, but thanks to Stu's help, Vic manages to arrest Teijo. Stu starts a relationship with Vic's daughter, Nicole.
It is a pity when a movie has such potentials to be more, yet in the end settles to be just the most generic, the most routine version of itself, as it is the case with "Stuber". It has two great actors, Dave Bautista and Kumail Nanjiani, who show chemistry by playing the two opposites in this 'buddy' film, a tough cop and a sensitive, intelligent Uber driver, and the opening act starts off well (equipped with a genius action sequence where the bad guy Teijo tries to escape from the upper floor of a building by jumping from balcony to balcony, and clinging on to it, but Vic then simply takes a table and throws it from the top on him, causing the villain to fall on the floor immediately). However, the film stubbornly refuses to pursue these good moments, and instead just pursues the dumbest, the most primitive and the most populist inane situations, never showing faith that it can engage the broad viewers by being simply smart. The whole setting that Vic has to spend the entire film half-blind after his eye laser surgery is misguided, whereas too many dumb supporting characters wreck the mood, such as the one of Richie, the vulgar owner of a store who constantly humiliates Stu, and whose subplot leads nowhere. A rare moment of inspiration shows up here and there, though: in one delicious sequence, Vic beats the teenage gangster, trying to force him to give him information about Teijo's whereabouts, but then Stu has a better idea. Stu simply takes the gangster's mobile phone, logs in to his social media web page, and writes that the gangster is in love with Ryan Gosling, citing "The Notebook" as the latter's favorite film, until the gangster confesses everything to stop this Internet embarrassment. A lot of moments in the story make no sense (the low point is the stupid fight between Vic and Stu in the warehouse), ending on a confusing note, since its good ideas are too sparse.
Grade:+
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