I am as upset as you are that I saw this movie.
I blocked out that saw it until about a month ago when I was doing a retrospective on all of the films of 2019. I noticed that this one was missing a review and it was tempting to claim that I had never really seen it to begin with. I don’t remember the circumstances that led Wife and I to see this in lieu of repeatedly punching each other in the face or dripping water over a damp cloth draped over our faces. I think maybe we thought that Dave Bautista was having a moment because My Spy (which as far as I’m aware is still not out) trailers were going strong just as Stuber snuck up on us. I am resistant to saying that there is nothing I like seeing Kumail Nanjiani in, because The Big Sick could very well have been someone else’s mistake even if it happened to be autobiographical material. I’m not going to fault him for making his wife’s illness into a story about how he and Ray Ramano became the best of friends while national treasure Zoe Kazan played comatose damsel in distress for ninety minutes. But I had misgivings about his ability to access my joy centers.
The film is pretty reliant on the gags from the trailers. What you’re missing from that blessedly cut 2 min version of the full length feature is a couple of fight scenes in a sporting goods store and Kumail Nanjiani finding ways to creepily take advantage of his low-key emotionally abusive female friend who seems hellbent on getting drunk enough to not be able to consent to a second sexual experience with him. Weird, right? I thought so too.
I don’t know if the film dates itself by making so much of its initial humor about the ride share company Uber, but in some ways it does feel like a bit of corporate porn without even trying. Stuber is always going to feel a little bit like a rush job regardless, since its premise is so reliant on a weirdly irrelevant joke about the protagonist driving part time to make some extra cash. A movie for Bautista completionists, ultimately.
