Prime Video’s The Pickup Review: I Am Far More Baffled Than Amused By Eddie Murphy And Pete Davidson’s Heist Comedy

If you look up “project that sounds way better on paper” and “wasted opportunity” in the dictionary, you won’t actually find anything, because that’s not how dictionaries work. In a world where those concepts were included, however, Prime Video’s new action-comedy The Pickup would be the pictured and heavily cited example, because wow, what an exercise in unexpectedly rampant disappointment. But how?

The three above-the-title stars involved are certainly all capable of delivering the goods, or even the greats. Eddie Murphy’s early career performances remain dynamic and influential enough to overshadow decades’ worth of lackluster projects, and his efforts in more recent projects like Dolemite Is My Name and Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F prove he’s still capable of unhinged magic. Pete Davidson is a slightly more acquired taste, but he excels at playing put-upon characters dealing with arrested development. And Keke Palmer… well, she’s just plain excellent in everything.

As such, even the most amateur mathematician would consider it a no-brainer to assume that Murphy + Davidson + Palmer would combine for a highly engaging modern crime comedy classic. Yet, that assumption gets almost violently upended by an abysmal script from co-writers Kevin Burrows and Matt Mider – arguably best known for the animated web series Gentleman Lobsters and sadly not for crafting worthwhile action-comedies.

Perhaps the writers aren’t fully at fault, however, since so many of the movie’s dead-on-arrival quips and one-liners appear to be ad-libbed by the actors, pushing the blame more on them and director Tim Story, whose hit-or-miss filmography includes the Ride Along movies, the Think Like a Man franchise, the 2005 and 2007 Fantastic Four blockbusters, and Barbershop. He also made the Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon vehicle Taxi, though — pun firmly intended — and that’s more in line with the armored truck-centric messiness of The Pickup.

Eddie Murphy and Pete Davidson’s talents are 100% wasted, and this should have been Keke Palmer’s movie from top to bottom.

The Pickup opens with what can only be considered a meet-threat, with Pete Davidson’s Travis, an armored truck driver and complete social misfit, misguidedly pulling a gun on Keke Palmer’s Zoe as she attempts to flirt with him. They quickly take things to the next level, and it’s clear that Zoe has ulterior motives, because Travis is a wiffle ball of a human being: mostly transparent with zero depth.

Had Davidson made The Pickup as his first foray into cinema early into his Saturday Night Live run, Travis might not be as fingernails-across-the-chalkboard grating to the nerves. But at this point in the actor's career, we’ve seen the comedian deliver far better performances and deliveries, even with similarly dimwitted characters.

Travis is paired up for an all-important and financially irresponsible delivery with Eddie Murphy’s Russell, a longtime fellow driver with an eye on celebrating his anniversary and eventually pivoting into a different career. This duo could have been fantastic, but the actors have lacking chemistry, with Travis veering from nebbish and put-upon to overbearing and fawning, while Russell mainly sticks to passive antagonism throughout. At least Eva Longoria, who plays Russell's wife Natalie, is ready to deliver during her fleeting scenes.

To be expected, Zoe has plans to rob the very truck that Travis and Russell are responsible for, and she has two completely forgettable henchman in tow. Claws’ Jack Kesy plays the humorless sack of testosterone Banner, with The Rings of Power’s Ismael Cruz Cordova bringing a modicum of a sassy personality as Miguel. These two take on more villainous roles as the story goes on, but never feel like a truly formidable threat, which is another one of this movie’s big issues.

The movie also features underserved appearances from Andrew Dice Clay and Marshawn Lynch and breaks the streak of A+ cameos from the former NFL star by wasting his comedic skills on a couple of nothingburger scenes. The Diceman, meanwhile, is like a made-for-cable J. Jonah Jameson, playing Travis and Russell's crabby, loud-mouthed boss.

The only character worth watching in this movie is Keke Palmer's Zoe, since she's the only actor whose star power is present and accounted for. I don't know how much better The Pickup would be if it focused solely on Zoe's wheeling and dealing, but I know my throat wouldn't feel quite as prickly from all the disgruntled groaning.

Everything in The Pickup feels like a deleted scene from a better movie.

Several of The Pickup's biggest action sequences revolve around the armored car speeding down highways and through city streets, mostly with Pete Davidson behind the wheel and Eddie Murphy doing the more physical acting inside the vehicle. These scenes in particular felt like they were cribbed from one of Judd Apatow's line-o-rama productions, particularly in regards to Travis blurting out an endless barrage of reactions to anything and everything happening around him. I can just imagine Tim Story & Co. keeping the camera on Davidson as he improvised one line after another, with everyone confident they were mining gold.

But instead of using the best lines, The Pickup only included the ones that make Davidson look like an attention-addled child taking his first road trip. None of the jokes that made the final cut are actually funny or original or worth extending the runtime to include, and that observation can be stretched out and applied to the entire movie.

To be fair, Story and the stunt & VFX teams deliver some pretty hectic and enjoyable explosions and crashes, largely set to a Speed-lite score, but so many of those moments are also predicated on either nonsense or unexplained lines and character choices. It's enough so that it feels like we're watching a subjective version of the story that was snipped out of a more fully informed version where relevant motivations and facts were included.

Case in point: Travis and Russell's truck contains a highly important and expensive monkey-under-glass display that comes up multiple times as if it's inherently the most hilarious prop imaginable (even to the point of it getting a post-credits gag), but without a scene that actually clues audiences in on why we should care. That informative scene, I assume, would be included in the director's cut that no one will ever petition for.

The creative choices range from questionable to pure fucking garbage.

I certainly understand that The Pickup is meant to be a breezy movie that shouldn't be taken too seriously, and that choosing to hone in on all of the baffling and/or under-cooked moments requires an unhealthy amount of misery and cynicism. However, I often felt like this storyline was actively provoking me into complaining about it.

The most obvious faux pas is the conceit that Travis and Zoe would actively vie for an authentic romance after the aforementioned sexual duping that kicks the movie off. Zoe is far too cool, sophisticated, and capable a human being for Travis' eternal manchild. Davidson's character always appears to be far more invested in obsessing over her than surviving any of the movie's ill-plotted conflicts.

The second biggest WTF decision was to cast Eddie Murphy, once one of Hollywood's most electric comedians, as the fuddy-duddy straight man opposite Davidson. I can somewhat appreciate the Lethal Weapon-esque run of age jokes at Russell's expense, but he's not really part of the joke there. Only one moment in the movie truly calls back to Murphy's golden-age delivery (what I'll refer to as Russell's diner rant), and it just feels like an impersonation of Murphy more than the real thing.

Even beyond its unfortunate first-draft decisions, The Pickup is littered with choices and moments that might have been clipped out if it weren't for the already svelte 94-minute runtime – with action-movie logic on full display. Example: two vehicles smash into the same side of the same car, and instead of the rammed car just being demolished, the other two go flying over it with fiery explosions. Make it make sense, but without gaslighting me into thinking some cars have giant hubcap ramps.

Characters also often refer to events and details without a lick of insight into their importance and do things that would only come out of a writer's brain. This is a movie where, after one baddie is seemingly killed off in a blaze of glory, another character makes a point of joking about how glaringly obvious it is that anyone would be dead after suffering such an incident... only for the supposed victim to return without any kind of dibilitating injuries and without anyone asking how the fuck it happened. Because spoilers: yes, they definitely should have died.

If I were to put a hard number on the amount of times I actually laughed at The Pickup itself, and not one of my own snarky comments, I honestly couldn't go higher than two. I can say without a doubt that I had more laughs at both of my parents' funerals, respectively. So if The Pickup can't even live up to the "comedy" half of its subgenre with its talent involved, how did we even get to this point?