It’s been decades since Eddie Murphy made an honest-to-goodness funny movie, and The Pickup won’t break that dispiriting streak.
Going straight to Prime Video on August 6 even though, in a just world, it would be released on DVD and sent directly to a Big Box retailer’s bargain bin, this heist comedy is a half-baked throwaway that’s so busy staging third-rate action sequences that it forgets to concoct a single passable joke.
Paired with Pete Davidson and Keke Palmer, two likable personalities given nothing witty to say or do, the legendary star spends the majority of this misfire looking alternately bored and really bored—an emotion that viewers will find all-too-relatable.
Russell (Murphy) is a workaholic armored truck driver who’s less than eager to retire and start up a bed and breakfast, much to the chagrin of his wife Natalie (Eva Longoria). On the couple’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Russel promises to be home in time for a celebratory dinner. However, his jerk boss Clark (Andrew Dice Clay, doing the same old profane schtick) mucks up his plans by giving him a long route and partnering him with Travis (Davidson).
Travis is a newbie whose last day at work was marred by his idiotic decision to hold a beautiful woman named Zoe (Keke Palmer) at gunpoint because he mistakenly thought she was robbing a bank. Regardless of this faux pas, Travis hasn’t lost his job (because Clark has yet to hear about it?), and he actually got to enjoy a sexy weekend with Zoe, during which time he spilled the beans about every facet of his gig.
The Pickup has no interest in being clever so it’s obvious from the moment “go” that Zoe is a crook. Alongside her partners Banner (Jack Kesy) and Miguel (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’s Ismael Cruz Córdova), she intends to lay siege to Russell and Travis during the prolonged portion of their drive that goes through rural New Jersey, where there’s no radio or cell phone service.
That an armored truck company would place one of its vehicles in a dead zone for more than an hour is inane, as is the fact that this stretch of highway is completely deserted at midday. While no one is expecting hardcore realism from a lark such as this, Matt Mider and Kevin Burrows’ script is so full of obvious nonsensicalities that the film seems determined to brazenly advertise its laziness.
The Pickup was shot in 2024, but its limited cast and remote, sparsely populated locations give it the feel of a COVID-era production. There’s no excuse, however, for its pervasive lack of humor.
Russell grimaces, rolls his eyes, and acts exasperated at Travis—an energetic idiot still smarting about his repeated failure to cut it as a legitimate police officer—and his verbal takedowns and retorts are habitually mild and mundane.
Russell is a grown-up who complains about aches and pains and wants to “do things by the book,” whereas Travis is an immature doofus with minimal impulse control. They both scream a lot (at each other, and about their situation) once they’re attacked by Zoe and her goons, whose buffoonish incompetence is all the more galling considering that Russell and Travis’ fortified ride is stunningly susceptible to sabotage—all it takes to neutralize it, apparently, is an arrow to a tire and a smoke bomb thrown in one of the truck’s unlocked side slots (?!?).
Twice during the course of this low-octane road trip, Story depicts people flying out the back of the armored truck in slow-motion, and he additionally tries to gussy up the proceedings with split screens, on-screen text, and a hip-hop soundtrack. Nonetheless, The Pickup is aesthetically flat and flaccid, and so too is its plotting.
After temporarily dispatching Banner and Miguel, Murphy and Davidson’s heroes are held hostage by Zoe, who reveals her true goal: to use the armored truck to steal $60 million from an Atlantic City casino as payback for the gambling den throwing her security-guard dad under the bus decades earlier.
Zoe thus thinks her crime is totally justified—as she argues, everyone who made this casino money did so corruptly!—and the film more or less takes her side, as does Travis, who finds himself caught between thwarting Zoe’s scheme and going along with it because he loves her.
Zoe, of course, seduced Travis simply to pry him for intel, and yet The Pickup immediately conveys that she’s sweet on him too—a twist that’s as undeveloped as it is groan-worthy. Zoe’s plan can’t hold up to two seconds’ worth of scrutiny, and things don’t get smarter once Natalie appears out of the blue to badger the deceptive Russell, and they all subsequently nab the casino loot (following a pointless run-in with cameoing WWE superstar Roman Reigns). Unfortunately, they don’t get funnier either.
Travis makes a few crass sexual comments that are more off-putting than uproarious, and a running gag about his gift for mathematical computations (accompanied by computer-y sound effects) is about as hard as the film works to generate a laugh—and even that bit is lackadaisical and lame. It’s as if everyone is waiting for someone else to improvise an inspired one-liner that might instigate a raucous back-and-forth, resulting in lots of dead air.
The Pickup idles its way through one of the most dispiriting car chases ever recorded, as well as an equally depressing shootout, on its way to a finale in which bad people are celebrated because of some wonky moral calculus and, also, because they weren’t as bad as the real bad guys, who got what they deserved.
Story’s film doesn’t warrant being taken seriously, but it’s so devoid of hilarity that one’s mind invariably focuses on its dim-witted narrative, not to mention the lethargy of its stars, with Murphy leading the pack in terms of sheer, unadulterated apathy. Too often over the past 30 years, this has been the comedian’s preferred mode of operation, and here, it more or less sabotages the entire endeavor; if Murphy isn’t trying, after all, why should audiences?
