Top: Stu (Kumail
Nanjiani) and Vic
(Dave Bautista)
weren’t having
the best of days.
Above: Let’s face
it, neither of them
were going to
get a decent
Uber rating.
Back in action
We visited Stuber’s set in
an Atlanta art gallery on
19 June 2018.
How Stuber attempts to
drag old-school 1980s
action comedies into
the modern age
DIRECTOR MICHAEL DOWSE grew
up watching, and loving, action comedies.
To him, the genre never got better than
48 Hrs., Lethal Weapon or Midnight Run:
movies which were “steeped in realism”
and which punched hard before
delivering their punchlines. “They weren’t
initially comedies,” says the Canadian
filmmaker behind scrappy ice-hockey
comedy Goon, “but then they would put
a comedy person in it and it would
become an action comedy.”
Now, with Stuber, Dowse hopes to
bring the genre roaring into the 21st
century. It stars Kumail Nanjiani (The
Big Sick) as Stu, a Los Angeles Uber
driver whose car is commandeered by
rogue über-cop Vic (Dave Bautista).
Vic’s just found out his partner’s killer
(The Raid’s Iko Uwais) is in town, but is
recovering from laser eye-surgery and
can’t see well enough to drive, so he forces
the hapless Stu to help him.
“When I read the script [written by
newcomer Tripper Clancy], I thought it
was a good blueprint for making the kind
of film I adored as a teenager,” says Dowse,
“and I thought, ‘There’s not a lot of
movies like that being made right now.’”
When Empire meets the cast and
crew on set in midtown Atlanta, all
the talk is of how he and his team are
keeping the stakes sky-high for the
characters. Not least Nanjiani’s regular
guy Stu, who is reluctantly dragged into
a bullet storm.
“The stakes are always real,” Nanjiani
tells Empire during a break. “It has to be
funny, but it has to always feel real. Too
many comedies right now don’t have
stakes, and stakes are the key to comedy.”
As well as embracing the chance to
form a double act with Bautista, Nanjiani
was also impressed by the way Clancy’s
script offered “an opportunity to do
something with an action movie that is
very current and hasn’t been done before.”
“I don’t want to overstate things,
but I feel we’re in an era where
masculinity needs to be redefined,”
says Nanjiani, “so this is our attempt
at talking about that. Dave plays a man
who’s not in touch with his feelings and
can only express anger, which is a big
male problem. And then my character
feels everything else, but has been
bottling up his anger.”
To Dowse, “the heart of the film
comes from those guys butting heads
and coming to some middle ground
about what it means to be a man in
this world. An action comedy is a great
playground to explore that.” As much
as Stuber’s returning some classic
’80s edge to the genre, it seems it’s
also bringing some much-needed
21st-century sensitivity. DAN JOLIN
STUBER IS IN CINEMAS FROM 11 JULY
