Give this taxi ride a miss, it’s not worth the journey
Stuber (15) Verdict: Dismal comedy ★✩✩✩✩ Kursk: The Last Mission (12A) Verdict: Tragic true story ★★★✩✩ MICHAEL MANN’S 2004 film Collateral starred Jamie Foxx as a Los Angeles cab driver, who ends up driving Tom Cruise’s hitman around as he carries out his kills. Stuber tries desperately, and fails dismally, to turn a similar premise into a comedy.
Kumail Nanjiani plays an LA Uber driver called Stu, whose boss, in his daytime job at a sporting goods shop, not very wittily nicknames him ‘Stuber’.
The film’s recurring ‘joke’ is that Stu is desperate for five-star reviews from his passengers, one of whom is a vengeful cop, Vic (Dave Bautista), who can’t drive himself in his mission to catch the drug lord who killed his partner as he’s just had an eye operation.
Vic’s near- blindness is another ‘joke’. It’s dismal, unfunny fare, made downright offensive by some pretty brutal violence.
KURSK: The Last Mission is a better bet. A little ploddingly at times, this film tells a terrible true story, that of the Russian submarine Kursk which, nearly 20 years ago, sank in the Barents Sea, killing 118 men. The Russian government at first declined the help of foreign vessels in the area (Colin Firth plays a British sub commander) and director Thomas Vinterberg’s film, based on a book about the tragedy, tells the story partly from the viewpoint of the stricken relatives back home. Vinterberg’s 2015 version of Far From The Madding Crowd featured Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts, spectacularly miscast as the ultimate English yeoman, Gabriel Oak. Schoenaerts is much better suited to his role here, as a stoical Russian submariner, with Lea Seydoux as his pregnant wife back home.