Here’s the One Time I Laughed During Eddie Murphy’s ‘The Pickup’
Warning: contains spoilers for The Pickup.
The Prime Video original movie The Pickup isn’t awful. As straight-to-streaming titles go, I actually found it more watchable than last month’s much more high-profile Happy Gilmore 2. But while its genre is officially action comedy, hard laughs were, for me, hard to come by.
If you’re not familiar — and you probably aren’t, since Prime Video is terrible at marketing its own titles; let me probably be the first to tell you that it dropped today — The Pickup is about a heist. Eddie Murphy plays Russell, a veteran armored-car driver in New Jersey. We’re meeting him on his 25th wedding anniversary. He and his wife Natalie (Eva Longoria) have been diligently saving so that he can ditch the job that requires him to get up at 4 a.m., and move on to their next phase of life running a bed and breakfast. For now, though, Russell has to get through his exceptionally long shift partnered with a rookie: Travis (Pete Davidson), who’s in a great mood since his recent meet-cute with Zoe (Keke Palmer) led to a horny weekend in her hotel room.
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Except, whoops, Zoe isn’t just a random woman whose flirty gesture of handing him her number on a deposit slip made him think she was robbing the place and pull his gun on her. She’s the leader of a three-person crew who intentionally targeted Travis for seduction so that she could pump him for information about his route. If he keeps making boneheaded moves like this, Travis is never going to fulfill his dream of becoming a cop, like everyone else in his family.
After Travis and Russell ingeniously put Zoe’s two original henchmen out of commission, Zoe pivots and, on threat of death, enlists the drivers in her real scheme: to take their truck to a chop shop, get it refitted with a different specific truck number and RFID, and use it to rob an Atlantic City casino for $60 million. Russell, who knows the procedure at casinos, tells her why it won’t work: Security personnel know whom they’re supposed to be dealing with from the truck company, and any changes come from the depot.
Before Zoe can answer his concerns, she gets a text from the chop shop letting her know the truck is ready.
“What’s that, an Android?” Russell asks. “You know what, keep the money. You need it.”
Android users STOP YELLING AT ME. I know there are way more Android than iPhone users worldwide. I’m sure this got posted in r/androiddisrespect or something, because there is no touchier segment of the population than Android users. I don’t want to customize my widgets. I would never use split-screen mode. I don’t need my phone to fold in half. I JUST THOUGHT THIS JOKE WAS FUNNY.
