Stuber, the new action-comedy starring Kumail Nanjiani as an Uber driver named Stu and Dave Bautista as a cop who commands his services, joins an exclusive club of movies that bring product placement into their very title. Because Nanjiani is very funny and Bautista is compellingly large, this is a more enjoyable movie than, say, the 1988 cult bomb Mac and Me, which features an elaborate dance scene at a McDonald’s. Still, critics are complaining that Stuber functions as a long commercial for Uber. We don’t know what sort of agreements were made between the ride-share company and 20th Century Fox behind closed doors, but let’s just say I got sick enough of hearing the word “Uber” dozens of times in ninety-three minutes that from here on out I’ll be referring to the movie as Clyft.

Yes, all the Uber talk in Clyft is annoying. But the movie is a more interesting cultural product than a simple instance of corporate synergy between Northern and Southern California. Stu is part of a lineage of cinematic cabbies drawn into a violent criminal world that stretches back to Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle. But his status as a contract worker for Uber changes his relationship to the urban streetscape, to the point that it structures the entire plot of Clyft. And at a time of crisis for Hollywood comedies — a dry spell that, based on opening weekend returns, Clyft seems unlikely to break — the movie attempts to chart a course for the buddy-cop flick out of the brutish masculine tropes for which the genre is known. Clyft presents a woke male sensibility incongruously superimposed against a backdrop of staggering levels of police violence and centered on the emotional demands of the traditionally feminized, low-wage, heavily surveilled service sector of the economy.

From Taxi Driver (1977) to Conspiracy Theory (1997) to Collateral (2004), the taxi driver has been cast in the role of a latter-day flaneur, that prototypically modern type who ambles through the city, observing its condensed forms of social life while remaining aloof from its rhythms. While the flaneur walked the streets, the cabbie zoomed by in relative automotive isolation, punctuated by intimate interactions with their fares. The drivers in most of the taxi movies don’t own their cars or medallions outright, and they follow the general rules of their industry — until they break them in spectacular fashion — but the nature of the job meant they had wide discretion over how they worked. That partial autonomy, along with the intermittent solitude, gave them plenty of time to theorize about the human condition. The cabbies, whether deranged nihilists like Travis Bickle or hopeful humanists like Jamie Foxx’s Max in Collateral, were a kind of autodidact philosopher class, free to bounce ideas off customers or their fellow drivers at the garage or the diner.