Review of the movie "The Pickup"

On August 6, Prime Video released the comedy action movie The Pickup, where Eddie Murphy and Pete Davidson combined their comedic talents in an attempt to entertain and amuse the viewer. Find out what happened in this review

“The Pickup”

Genre comedy action movie about a robbery
Director Tim Story
Starring Eddie Murphy, Pete Davidson, Keke Palmer, Jack Cassie, Ismael Cruz Cordova, Eva Longoria, Andrew Dice Clay, Jeff Holbrook, Marshawn Lynch, Joe Anoa’i, Lara Grice
Premiere Prime Video
Year of issue 2025
Website IMDb

Travis Stolley, a collection officer, is the kind of guy who panics and grabs his gun when he sees a pretty girl writing her phone number on a napkin. His elderly colleague Russell Pierce is the kind of guy who works in the same job all his life and even in his pre-retirement years has to obey the will of a harmful boss. It is these two who will have to carry the valuable cargo today. But the conflict between youthful enthusiasm and old man’s grumbling becomes the least of the problems for the newly-made partners when they are attacked by robbers.

Recently, there have been a lot of stories about robberies of cash collectors. Just a month ago, Sylvester Stallone tried unsuccessfully to open a collection truck in a ridiculous Armor. A little later, the same thing was done in a crime thriller The Order Justin Kurzel. Now, the next contenders for the big prize are coming up.

But The Pickup is not just a movie about robberies. Alongside the attempts to get rich illegally, there is a good old-fashioned buddy movie. And in a tradition that goes back to 70s comedy films (Silver Streak) and 80s police action movies (Lethal Weapon), the local interaction is a partnership between a white and a black guy. After all, Eddie Murphy himself did a good job in this direction, with 48 Hrs. (1982), Trading Places (1983), and of course, Beverly Hills Cop (1984) or the more recent Showtime (2002).

In this context, The Pickup is reminiscent of the recent a sequel to Happy Gilmore. There, too, the authors had enough inspiration and creativity for about 30 minutes, and then the scriptwriters probably entrusted the work to artificial intelligence, and on the set, the director and everyone involved let the process run its course.

Tim Story has made buddy movies before — two installments of Ride Along with Ice Cube and Kevin Hart are worth mentioning — but he is best known to the mass audience for his work on the 2005 and 2007 Fantastic Four films. And when the the newest version of the superhero team, the work of this filmmaker was not made by the same people, and he never managed to gain a foothold in the big league of high-budget cinema.

What do Story and the little-known screenwriters Matt Mider and Kevin Burrows offer the viewer this time? In addition to the lazy character conflict between Murphy and Davidson’s characters, the movie has some good action, but it’s hardly exciting. During the chases, the following is repeatedly mentioned Fast and Furious, but it’s a very low-budget movie. That is, you won’t find scenes of the scale of the theft of gasoline tankers at full throttle in the Dominican Republic. Although the producers didn’t even skimp on an episode with a couple of police cars turned upside down in a slam dunk.

But the main star of the show is surprisingly restrained. It seems that the obviously uninspired actor himself is well aware of the mediocrity in which he is acting, so his tired performance can only be described as a run of the mill. At the same time, the script itself doesn’t allow for any maneuvers that would allow Murphy to show off his comedic talent. In 2011, he already starred in the heist comedy Tower Heist, and it was much, much better in every way.

Other participants in the local adventure are not memorable either. The only thing worth noting is that wrestler Roman Reigns was spotted in the frame (but this appearance does not affect anything), and Eva Longoria looks simply fantastic for a person who woke up with the first cocks and simultaneously starred in science fiction with 0% positive reviews (which, however, at the time of writing, had crept up to 4%).

Having quite a cheerful and exciting segment at the beginning, The Pickup eventually slips into standard average streaming nonsense, which buries itself the longer it goes on. It’s such a neutral and lazy streaming movie that the creators decided not to even bother with the poster, which makes it look like as secondary as possible. It is better to go to the frivolous Liam Neeson to watch than a completely indifferent Eddie Murphy.