For the life of me, I’ll never understand how you’d cast Eddie Murphy in your action comedy and then have him play the straight man. Even if there were questions about whether he could still do the job, those were answered with last year’s surprisingly delightful Beverly Hills Cop sequel.
And yet, here we have The Pickup, in which Murphy plays an armored-truck driver who’s winding down his career before planning to move on to open a bed-and-breakfast with his wife, Eva Longoria. But wouldn’t you know it, he gets caught up in a wildly overcomplicated heist that has him trying to outrun villains who would steal his truck.
It’s problem enough that Murphy doesn’t get the laugh lines, but the whole issue is compounded by the fact that his foil is Pete Davidson, who is comedically inert in the film—Davidson is the “new guy” on the job and is partnered with Murphy on this ill-fated mission, although he’s also largely inept and alternately meek and a blowhard, which is supposed to exasperate Murphy, and does, but it also exasperates us, because there’s little attempt at creating a character or even having any real comedy. His throwaway lines are truly thrown away, his jokes land like they came from the first draft of the script and everyone forgot to go back and punch them up before shooting the movie. Murphy, for his part, is consistently funnier than Davidson is throughout, even though he doesn’t really have any jokes. It’s just who he is.
There are some car chases that aren’t dreadful, although they’re mostly put together with a cut to the driver, cut to the road, cut to the gear shift, cut to the other car, cut to the front of the car, cut cut cut cut cut. You know how it goes. There’s an extremely clumsy attempt to inject romance and emotion into the whole heist scheme, which just makes it all even more sloppy than it was before. It’s not entirely clear what this movie was trying to accomplish by doing things the way it did, but Hollywood, I’m begging you: just let Eddie Murphy do what he does best.
The Pickup is on Amazon Prime Video.
