The Pickup is the sort of forced, inorganic, and tiresome straight-to-streaming action comedy one always hopes star Eddie Murphy has moved on from, but somehow the actor still hasn’t learned his lesson. For every shot in the arm his career gets from doing another Beverly Hills Cop movie or reminding viewers that he can give a great comedic or dramatic performance when asked to dig a bit deeper, Murphy suffers through abject duds like Metro, Showtime, Tower Heist, and The Pickup, films so bland and lifeless that they couldn’t be picked out of a lineup from other similar movies. Uninspired in the extreme, The Pickup isn’t the lowest point for Murphy, but it assuredly belongs to the padded out middle ground of his lengthy career on screen; 95 minutes of background noise occasionally punctuated by two decent action sequences and almost nothing else that can retain the viewer’s attention.
Murphy plays Russ, a veteran armoured car guard approaching not only retirement, but a potential career pivot. It’s Russ’ anniversary, and there will be hell to pay from his wife (Eva Longoria) if he’s late for their celebratory dinner. Naturally, Russ’ boss (Andrew Dice Clay) doesn’t care, and gives him a lengthy route alongside bumbling, obnoxious new guy, Travis (Pete Davidson). Annoying and categorically useless outside of his driving and math skills, Travis gets on Russ’ every last nerve. But they’re forced to work together when their truck becomes the target of Zoe (Keke Palmer), a highly motivated thief, who wants to steal their wheels to help rob an Atlantic City casino of sixty million dollars. Things are made more difficult when Travis realizes that the woman robbing them is a hookup he had the previous weekend that he’s developing serious feelings for.
The Pickup is the latest film from director Tim Story (Ride Along, Fantastic Four, Barbershop, The Blackening), a filmmaker who has obvious talent behind the camera, but terrible judgment when it comes to material. With the exception of Barbershop, Story has never made a film that boasts a fully cohesive, interesting, and engaging script, and the one for The Pickup (courtesy of Kevin Burrows and Matt Mider) is generic, implausible, and worst of all, painfully unfunny. I don’t know if Story tinkers with scripts when he gets them to somehow make them more “commercially viable” or if he’s always being asked to direct stinkers, but almost everything he has been a part of ends up turning out the same way, and he’s the only common denominator.
The Pickup is a good looking movie, and the large scale chase sequences that end the first and third acts of the film are impressive from a stunt-work perspective, but nothing else captures the viewer’s imagination. Save for a halfway amusing and well performed sequence where the three leads sit down for a comedically tense conversation over brunch, none of the scenarios in The Pickup are entertaining to watch unless bullets are flying or pavement is getting burnt up. Even then, there are really only two major action sequences to focus on, and these moments aren’t aggressive, inventive, or chaotic enough to generate much good will. They’re just pretty good moments in a dire film.
This is the kind of movie where the pieces never add up to a satisfying whole. Riddled with plot holes and jaw dropping lapses in logic, The Pickup might’ve been fun if the viewer could turn their brain off, but Story and the writing team haven’t provided material that’s fun enough to do just that. Through oceans of wheezy banter, shameless pandering (including a Beverly Hills Cop reference that lands with a thud), and a lack of swagger, The Pickup thinks quite highly of itself for a movie that has no new ideas or notions to call its own. When a script includes numerous instances of someone tossing out a zinger only to have another character remark upon how cool of a line that just was, you know a movie is in serious trouble.
Although the cast looks good on paper, The Pickup is a movie where everyone looks like they just decided to swap roles the day shooting commenced for no good reason. Murphy looks checked out here, bringing no intensity or life to his part as a burnt out, put upon everyday drone, but he’s still preferable to the shrill, annoying overacting of Davidson, who turns in some career worst work here. Davidson’s comedic chops are often at their best whenever there’s some degree of reality for him to pull from. In The Pickup, Davidson is mugging with full force, and there’s something distinctly off putting about it, with a scene where his dopey character breaks down crying being one of the worst in any movie this year. Murphy’s annoyance with his co-star looks palpably real, as if the more seasoned performer might regret being cast as the straight-arrow to Davidson’s unhinged dork. Murphy can get more of a chuckle here simply by sitting still and not doing a thing than Davidson can get by using his entire body.
Longoria plays a stereotype of a firebrand Latina housewife, but strangely she’s also able to coax out the most realistic and meaningful moment out of Davidson’s character, so thank goodness she’s there at all. As for Palmer, she steals the show in a walk, even when saddled to a pseudo-villainous character whose supposed knack for planning and forethought is constantly undermined by the idiotic script. Almost all of the laughs in The Pickup belong to Palmer, who deserves so much better than this, and yet paradoxically proves that she’s a star simply by weathering this raincloud of a comedy. (Davidson’s one laugh comes at the very end via what had to be an ad-lib, and possibly something that just came out of the actor’s mouth when he thought they had yelled cut already.)
Trying to sit through The Pickup is an act of futility and frustration. If you try paying attention to what’s happening on screen, you’ll quickly realize that you’re wasting your time. If you put it on in the background while doing chores, popping in and out of the room, and checking your phone every few minutes, you won’t realize that the movie isn’t doing anything for you in the first place. It’s a film that won’t work if you trying to shut your brain off and have fun with it, but instead it requires you to have zero attention span whatsoever in the hopes that you’ll forget everything that happened in less time than it took you to decide upon watching it in the first place. When people talk about bad, big budget streaming movies, The Pickup should be at the forefront of that conversation with a lot of equally forgettable wastes of money, time, and energy.
The Pickup is streaming on Prime Video starting Wednesday, August 6, 2025.
