Several episodes into Showtime’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) prepares to wage a charm offensive on the media. “Let’s show these motherfuckers who the fuck Travis Kalanick really is, huh?” he declares to his team, confident that his personality will be enough to turn the tide on years of bad press.
We the audience know better, and not just because out here in the real world, we’ve already seen how this story ends. Super Pumped, up to that point and beyond, has been about little but showing us who the fuck Travis Kalanick really is. And while the picture it paints isn’t always the prettiest one, the fact that it’s so laser-focused on Travis to the exclusion of all others feels like its own odd form of flattery.
Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber
The Bottom Line Intermittently interesting but ultimately superficial.
Based on the nonfiction book by Mike Isaac and adapted for the screen by Billions cocreators Brian Koppelman and David Levien, Super Pumped chronicles Travis’ rapid rise and equally dizzying downfall over the course of the 2010s. It’s a story that’s already been documented extensively, in relatively recent headlines, and Super Pumped follows what films like The Big Short and I, Tonya have made into a standard template for narratives like those. Its dramatic scenes are augmented with rapid smash cuts, aggressive voiceover (courtesy of Billions superfan Quentin Tarantino), video-game-inspired graphics and the occasional fourth-wall-breaking monologue, with a distinctly Social Network-y score for good measure.
These bells and whistles may not feel particularly new, but they’re effective enough for entertainment. Combined with Super Pumped‘s rapid-fire, reference-laden dialogue — much like on Billions, no one in Super Pumped simply says what they mean when they can namecheck Secretariat or Alexander Hamilton or Fast & Furious 6 first — they inject an impish sense of humor into what could otherwise have come off as a dry boardroom drama.
Gordon-Levitt proves a sturdy anchor for the show’s wild tonal shifts, weaponizing the boyish charm that’s defined much of his career. What Travis’ business partners and loved ones initially indulge as the brash ambition of youth reveals itself over time to be something far less attractive. For all his big ideas — and Super Pumped suggests it’s ruthlessness as much as brilliance that got Travis where he is — he’s not so much an enfant terrible as a big old baby, throwing temper tantrums at his board members and whining to his hardworking employees that he has to do everything around here.
That angle marks a change of pace from earlier tech biopics like The Social Network and Steve Jobs, which sought to humanize and glorify its subjects while also acknowledging their colder, more callous tendencies. In Super Pumped, even tech giants like Google’s Sergey Brin (David Krumholtz) and Larry Page (Ben Feldman) come off more like socially awkward oddballs a la Silicon Valley than the untouchable geniuses of legend. Still, both Super Pumped and Travis seem intensely aware of the distinction between Travis and the Silicon Valley success stories that came before him. In scene after scene, he compares himself to men like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, sometimes to count himself among their vaunted number, but just as often to whine that he doesn’t command the same respect they do.
But if Super Pumped doesn’t exactly sing Travis’ praises, it does lavish him with attention — so much of it, it seems to have little left for anyone or anything else. The larger culture of tech worship that Uber came up in goes largely unexplored, so that it’s hard to tell if Uber and Kalanick are the aberration, or if basically nice and normal-seeming Lyft founder John Zimmer (John Magaro) is. Travis’ is the only psychology the series seems eager to delve into; nearly everyone else is merely an accessory, obstacle or witness to the Travis Kalanick story.
That extends even to Uber board members Bill Gurley (Kyle Chandler) and Arianna Huffington (Uma Thurman), the two non-Travis characters who get the most depth and screen time. Chandler exudes a no-nonsense decency that echoes his signature Friday Night Lights role, while Thurman seems to be having a blast adopting a thick accent and a syrupy smile to purr sweet nothings into her hotheaded founder’s ear. (Brat that he is, he’s easily manipulated by lines like “Serving yourself is serving the company, which is serving the world.”) But they spend nearly all of their time talking to Travis, talking about Travis, thinking about Travis. Their own motivations are vaguely indicated to be monetary, which on the one hand is fair — dollar amounts in the billions will warp anyone’s brain — and on the other hand feels too pat to serve as the foundation of an interesting dynamic.
Nowhere are both the series’ strengths and weaknesses more evident than in its fifth episode (of five sent to critics, and of seven total for the season). Forced to explain Uber’s recent troubles to Apple CEO Tim Cook (Hank Azaria) — never mind that the framing device doesn’t make much sense — Super Pumped piles on elaborate graphics, flashbacks and counter-narratives within those flashbacks. One goes to a female employee, Susan (Eva Victor), taking Uber to task for its toxic environment of misogyny and sexual harassment, while the other centers on a driver, Fawzi (Mousa Hussein Kraish), whose fortunes rise and fall at the whims of corporate policy.
In some ways, their accounts seem to represent a turning point for the series. They give a spotlight and a microphone to those who’d previously struggled in the background while Travis and his sycophants were high-fiving each other in his office, and their unexpectedness in the moment make us want to sit up and pay attention. But it quickly becomes clear that Super Pumped is not much interested in either Susan or Fawzi as people with their own agendas or inner lives. They’re just personifications of talking points, defined entirely by their relationships to Uber.
After listening to Travis’ increasingly baroque series of excuses, during which he deflects and denies the problems he can and offloads blame for the problems he can’t, Tim responds with a plea: “Travis, this is all you. You must see that. Please tell me you see that.” Travis obviously cannot, no matter what he mumbles to Tim, because as has been well established by then, that’s just who Travis is.
The bigger issue is that it’s not totally clear the series can see it either. Super Pumped has its share of pleasures, from a sprawling cast of familiar faces (Kerry Bishé, Fred Armisen and Elisabeth Shue are also among them) to a catchy soundtrack stuffed with the likes of Queen and Alice in Chains. But without anything deep or fresh to say about what we’re seeing, it all amounts to not much more than a shallow portrait of a self-proclaimed asshole.
Source: Hollywood
