{"id":43526,"date":"2025-08-04T19:25:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-04T19:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/43526\/"},"modified":"2025-08-04T19:25:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-04T19:25:10","slug":"eddie-murphy-and-pete-davidson-in-heist-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/43526\/","title":{"rendered":"Eddie Murphy and Pete Davidson in Heist Comedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tYou wouldn\u2019t want to be caught in an emergency situation with Travis (Pete Davidson<\/a>), one of the main characters in Prime Video\u2019s bumpy heist comedy The Pickup. The dopey armor truck guard is the kind of guy that panics under pressure. At the start of the Tim Story<\/a>-directed feature, Travis pulls a gun on a customer at the bank, thinking the woman is trying to rob him. But Zoe (Keke Palmer<\/a>), relaxed and charming, just wants to give him her number.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tRuss (Eddie Murphy<\/a>) intuits this about Travis, so when the two are paired up for a work shift, the veteran armor truck driver is more than annoyed. It\u2019s his anniversary, and he just wants to finish in time so he can meet his wife (Eva Longoria<\/a>) for dinner, but their bad-tempered manager (Andrew Dice Clay) has given the unlikely duo a particularly tricky route. But all seems well until they are confronted by a team of armed robbers who give the truck drivers a choice:\u00a0Will they relinquish the goods and live, or try to be heroes and die?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tThe Pickup\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tA jerky ride.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tRelease date: Wednesday, Aug. 6
Cast: Eddie Murphy, Pete Davidson, Keke Palmer, Eva Longoria, Ismael Cruz Cordova, Jack Kesy
Director: Tim Story
Screenwriters: Kevin Burrows, Matt Mider
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tRated R,
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 34 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tWorking from a screenplay by the writing duo Kevin Burrows\u00a0and Matt Mider (Gentleman Lobsters, The Package), Story (The Blackening<\/a>, Barbershop, Shaft) shapes a comedy thriller that swerves and jerks to a mildly satisfying conclusion. The film boasts a strong comic cast with Murphy, Davidson and Palmer at the lead. Their chemistry is naturally compelling, which helps us buy into their increasingly ridiculous situation. <\/p>\n

\n\tDavidson and Murphy play particularly well off of each other as the goofy junior employee and the impatient veteran, but Palmer and Longoria hold their own as well. The Desperate Housewives alum injects much needed energy into the latter half of the story, which teeters under the weight of its own antics. It\u2019s also exciting to see the One of Them Days<\/a> actress flex her skills in a role that calls for a steely coolness. But while the stars come in hot, playing their roles with gusto, it soon becomes clear that all that energy doesn\u2019t have many places to go, and The Pickup loses steam fast.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe armed goons don\u2019t leave Russ and Travis with great options, and both men find themselves torn. Russ feels duty-bound to this role, but he\u2019s also on the cusp of retirement and just wants to get home. Travis would prefer not to die in the middle of a random stretch of road, but he\u2019s also eager to prove that he can be a police officer like the rest of his family. Much to the surprise of the robbers, the two men try to defend the truck. Travis, showing off some deft driving, attempts to lose the two cars chasing them, while Russ demonstrates hidden fight skills.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe pair manage to do some serious damage, and after a chaotic melee, one of the bandits is revealed to be Zoe. Determined to get her money, she improvises and takes the drivers hostage. A heartbroken Travis convinces her not to tell Russ that they know each other, and I can\u2019t say their deal makes all that much sense. But Zoe proves to be a more complicated antagonist whose motivation for robbing the truck in the first place is one of the more mildly interesting threads in The Pickup. Like The Blackening, it tries to subvert expectations of the comedy heist thriller by injecting some straightforward and unexpected class analysis; similar to Carry-On<\/a>, there\u2019s also a focus on the working class man\u2019s attempt to climb the corporate ranks. <\/p>\n

\n\tStory shows off his skill as a helmer by staging some explosive and dramatic fight scenes. Tires get slashed, paint bombs are set off and cars crash and burst into flames. Christopher Lennertz composes appropriately hair-raising music for all this pandemonium.\u00a0However, The Pickup possesses a similar clunkiness to Lift<\/a>, that Netflix heist movie starring Kevin Hart. <\/p>\n

\n\tAfter Zoe kidnaps Travis and Russ, she forces them to join her plan to rob a casino in Atlantic City. Now, here\u2019s where things get tricky for our protagonists and for the film. Zoe\u2019s clever but convoluted plan takes the crew through New Jersey and its glorious highways. There are chunks of this journey that assume the energy of a buddy comedy, with Zoe, Travis and Russ demonstrating surprising amounts of teamwork. <\/p>\n

\n\tBut the adventure often seems random in its humor and low in its stakes. There seems to be an effort to outsmart viewers familiar with the beats of this kind of plot, and while that\u2019s initially somewhat charming, the antics start to wear on you. It\u2019s not helpful that the jokes start to become repetitive and the character dynamics more one-dimensional, or that some scenes (as when Travis pulls a gun on Zoe) don\u2019t really get the intended laughs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tStill, there are parts of the The Pickup that instigate genuine reactions,\u00a0whether it\u2019s a laugh or a bit of fear. The film finds steadier footing in the third act when Russ\u2019s wife, Natalie, suspicious of her husband\u2019s odd behavior on the phone, becomes ensnared in this trippy heist. Not only does Longoria deploy some great one-liners, but her character\u2019s presence fortifies the existing dynamic, ultimately helping the movie cruise to a low key satisfying finish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You wouldn\u2019t want to be caught in an emergency situation with Travis (Pete Davidson), one of the main…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":43527,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,28162,134,38090,38091,344,20467,38092],"class_list":{"0":"post-43526","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-eddie-murphy","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-eva-longoria","13":"tag-keke-palmer","14":"tag-movies","15":"tag-pete-davidson","16":"tag-tim-story"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}