Eddie Murphy Is Left Holding the Bag in Dull Amazon Crime Comedy The Pickup

It’s been a while since the last time I’ve seen a movie actually employ the “love theme starts playing in a man’s head when he sees a beautiful woman for the first time” trope, but the fact that it’s present in the opening moments of Amazon Prime’s new action-crime-comedy The Pickup is indicative of the formulaic and dated feature film that Ride Along director Tim Story has served up. Featuring a notably tired performance from a check-cashing Eddie Murphy, who nevertheless is still asked to be more active than a glued-to-his-seat Pete Davidson, it’s a fusion of car chase actioner and casino heist caper that aspires toward a wisecracking, Guy Ritchie-esque fusion of gunplay and laughs, but largely forgets its comedy mission along the way, while cribbing all of its action from superior entries in adjacent genres.

That inner monologue love theme comes courtesy of The Pickup’s establishing scene, in which armored truck driver/hapless wannabe cop Travis (Pete Davidson) makes a titular monetary pickup at a bank, only to be (understandably) smitten by the beautiful Zoe (Keke Palmer, radiant as a criminal mastermind with a heart of gold). He finds nothing at all suspicious about this woman immediately giving him her phone number after an awkward 30-second interaction, nor does he see anything amiss when she brings him back to her hotel to hook up (and squeeze him for information on his job). It’s the start of The Pickup’s frequent issues with basic believability–just because the real life Pete Davidson has famously managed to date a menagerie of the world’s most beautiful women, it doesn’t mean his self-described loser characters should be so naive to believe that they can inexplicably do the same. But what else should one expect of a film in which we’re also asked to accept that there are vast, empty stretches of interstate outside of Atlantic City (?), where cell phone reception becomes a “dead zone” for 90 minutes at a time? This world clearly conforms to the needs of its screenplay, so New Jersey becomes a backwoods wilderness, with interstates completely devoid of any other car traffic, leaving us to our hijackings and stunts without rubbernecking onlookers. Very convenient!

Travis is in the typical mold of friendly, verbose but irritating oaf (his clever nickname in the film is “asshole head”) so often played by Davidson, which makes him an obvious comedic foil to pair with a grumpy, “I’m too old for this shit” Russell (Eddie Murphy). Both characters have traits that are oddly established and then never really utilized: Travis suddenly demonstrates a savant-like knack for mental math and calculations, accompanied by silly, modem-like sound effects, but the film then never uses that ability in any pertinent way, making it feel like a remnant from some earlier draft of the screenplay. Russell likewise has only the most basic characterization: He wants to retire and get out of the “driving armored truck” game, so he can finally open a bed and breakfast with his wife (a totally underutilized Eva Longoria, stuck doing “feisty Latina” tropes). Of the principle cast members, Murphy is really left holding the bag here–he seems utterly checked out most of the time, unsure of if Russell is supposed to be prickly, charmingly suave, or nebbish. He never really lands on an answer, while very occasionally indulging the audience with some more recognizable Eddie Murphyisms, but the heightened elements of the performance flash for these brief moments and then sink back down to a sludgy baseline of exhaustion. You wish he could summon up a shred of the enthusiasm from Dolemite Is My Name, but he clearly has no passion for the material here.