'The Pickup' Review, Starring Eddie Murphy, Pete Davidson, and Keke Palmer

Bad Movies Used to Have Soul

Header Image Source: Prime Video

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 woul