Bad Movies Used To Have Soul

Bad movies used to be actively bad. There was something almost noble about them because they tried to be good movies and failed spectacularly. They were memorably bad. And Eddie Murphy starred in a lot of them.

What’s so remarkably bleak about the streaming era of bad movies is that so many of them aren’t even trying to be good. They’re packaging well known stars (like Eddie Murphy, Pete Davidson, Eva Longoria, and Keke Palmer) with veteran directors (Tim Story, Barbershop, Fantastic Four (2005)), and selling those packages to giant platforms without any regard for how good the movie is. Because the quality of the film isn’t important; it’s whether someone will click on it. If the quality were important, they would not have entrusted it to screenwriters whose only other credit was a 2018 Netflix film called The Package, which no one remembers.

They’re not selling movies. They’re selling thumbnails. And hundreds of thousands of Prime Video subscribers are going to click on The Pickup thumbnail containing the cast member from the movie that an algorithm determines that you like the most.

And then you will sit through an hour and a half of hospital pudding. The Pickup is passively bad. It’s a movie poster that streams for an hour and a half. No one in this movie, for whom you may have had a previous fondness, will say anything or do anything that will stir you from the half-lidded viewing experience on a screen you watch on your lap.

There is nothing here remotely interesting. No laughs. No suspense. No interesting action sequences. No twists. The film has zero respect for its audience, and no one gives a sh** because they got paid and there’s nothing here even bad enough to dissuade you the next time you see one of their faces on a thumbnail.

It’s a pointless film whose only purpose is to take up space in the cloud, collect viewable hours from the indifferent masses, and show up as a line of data on an executive’s Prime Video spreadsheet.