Director Tim Story is the king of two-film franchises. He helmed such series as the original Fantastic Four films, the Think Like A Man twofer, and the Ride Along movies, in addition to such winners as Barbershop (on the first one) and The Blackening. Story is a classic hit-and-miss filmmaker, whose work either hits or misses based on whether there is a solid screenplay and not necessarily his direction. Case in point: his latest film, The Pick-Up, which follows a pair of mismatched armored truck drivers, Russell (Eddie Murphy) and Travis (Pete Davidson). The two are sent on a faraway job that is interrupted by a trio of ruthless criminals led by Zoe (Keke Palmer), who it turns out isn’t after anything in the truck; she’s after the truck itself. Long story.
Russell is happily married to Natalie (Eva Longoria); in fact, the day of this crime is their 25th wedding anniversary, and they have unbreakable plans to have dinner at the same restaurant where they had their first date. Travis, on the other hand, is a bit of a loser, having recently failed the police entrance exam and taken this job as something of a consolation prize. By some grand fortune, he meets a woman the day before this heist and gets lucky, even after he pulls a gun on her while on the job. He seemed to think she’s trying to rob him in a bank, when she was simply trying to slip him her phone number. The fact that she forgave such a thing should have been Travis’s first red flag that something was up, but he’s not to good at reading signals—verbal or otherwise—and big surprise: after spilling all of his on-the-job secrets during pillow talk, it turns out the woman he's with is Zoe, and she’s playing him as part of her plot to hijack the truck.
After failed attempts to stop the robbery (and some ridiculous and unnecessary action sequences), The Pick-Up takes a few unexpected but not especially interesting twists, including Zoe’s cohorts (Jack Kesy and Ismael Cruz Cordova) turning on her after she ditches them in a high-speed chase after the armored truck. We also get memorable but not especially funny supporting parts for Andrew Dice Clay as the head of the armored truck company and Marshawn Lynch as a chop-shop chief who preps the stollen vehicle for its ultimate heist.
Through means too complicated and idiotic to get into, Longoria ends up on the armored car as well, one of multiple hostages, and Travis still thinks he and Zoe might end up together after all is said and done, since he thinks they had a real connection during their night of passion the day before. Murphy and Davidson bicker unconvincingly (Davidson was funnier in his other current release, The Home, and that movie wasn’t even a comedy), and I barely remember laughing at the comedy here or thinking any part of the action was especially thrilling either. Palmer comes out the best and most likable, mostly because she appears to be the only stable and mature character in The Pick-Up, not that the bar is high for either trait. They even shore up her character’s backstory and motivation for this overly complex job in such a way that we’re supposed to feel sympathetic to her cause and start rooting for her final crime to be a success.
Murphy seems wholly disinterested is being in this movie, and when one of the most charismatic comedic actors of all time gets stuck playing a curmudgeon, your film is in serious trouble. The Pick-Up isn’t without laughs, but they occur infrequently and little of it sticks with you beyond the mercifully short running time. As we learned in the 1990s, not everything with Eddie Murphy can be a winner.
The film is now streaming on Prime Video.
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