The Pickup, now streaming on Prime Video, has a few elements that are promising. It’s Eddie Murphy in a buddy comedy, which is a formula that’s worked in the past. He’s paired with Pete Davidson, who shares with Eddie the background of having joined Saturday Night Live at a young age.
They’re opposite Keke Palmer, who’s been on a roll lately with Nope and One of Them Days, and the film sports a highly eclectic supporting cast that includes Eva Longoria, Andrew Dice Clay, Marshawn Lynch, and Joe Anoa’i, also known as WWE star Roman Reigns. Director Tim Story has had an up-and-down career, but he’s made some decent comedies, including the underrated Ride Along movies, and “multi-stage armored-truck heist comedy, centered in Atlantic City” is a premise with some promise.
Unfortunately, it’s all a letdown, because just about nothing funny happens for the entire 94 minutes. Murphy and Davidson end up showing less-than-stellar chemistry, and the screenplay (by Matt Mider and Kevin Burrows) doesn’t give them much, dialogue-wise. At one point, one character takes another hostage and blurts out, “You’re my insurance policy!,” in case we didn’t grasp why he did so. The two leading actors play drivers for an armored truck company. Murphy is celebrating his 25th anniversary with his wife (Longoria) and hoping to retire, while Davidson is a bumbling newbie who wanted to be a cop but couldn’t pass the test.
Early on, Davidson meets Palmer’s character and has an awkward meet-cute with her; knowing his real-life reputation, Davidson isn’t believable as a guy who’s inept with women. The two have a one-night stand, but it turns out she’s running a honeypot operation to steal the truck and carry out a sophisticated heist on an Atlantic City casino. But don’t forget, this love interest/criminal is also given a tragic and sympathetic backstory.
This plot necessitates several lengthy highway chase scenes, which are underwhelming, but that’s not the worst thing: the highway scenes are set on an alternative-universe version of the Atlantic City Expressway, on which there’s never any traffic, there are no state troopers, and there’s a “90-mile dead zone” with no cell phone reception. Which, as a pretty frequent traveler of that highway, is laughable. (The film was shot in Atlanta.)
As for the Atlantic City heist, if you were expecting something like the tight, thrilling Las Vegas casino robbery at the end of Ocean’s Eleven, it’s the exact opposite. It’s barely seen. And there’s also a monkey involved, for some reason. Which is about as funny as it sounds.
While Palmer gives the closest thing to a strong performance, most of the other performers aren’t given much to do. Longoria is there only to be briefly held hostage; the actress was also in Prime Video’s other worst-movie-of-the-year contender this month, War of the Worlds.
Lynch, the former NFL star who was so memorable in Bottoms, is wasted, while Clay, who delivered a fine supporting performance as Lady Gaga’s father in A Star is Born, just does his old schtick from the 1980s. Roman Reigns is in one scene, in which he essentially plays himself; it’s not Hulk Hogan in Rocky III.