Buddy comedies are trickier than they may seem on the surface. Comedic chemistry is fickle and finding a pair of actors who effectively complement each other doesn’t always happen automatically, even when both actors are funny enough individually. Of course, a strong script with clever writing helps with this as well. Unfortunately, “Stuber,” the new buddy cop comedy starring Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista, fails on both these accounts.

Nanjiani stars as Stu, a down-on-his-luck sports equipment salesman who drives for the ride-share app Uber to make a little extra money on the side. He has a woeful crush on his best friend Becca (Bette Gilpin), with whom he’s on the verge of financing a spin aerobics studio with, and he can’t seem to catch a break with his loudmouth supervisor who has dubbed him with the nickname “Stuber.” Things get a little more exciting in Stu’s life after he picks up Dave Bautista as Vic, a no-nonsense LAPD officer who’s still recovering from laser eye surgery and who needs rides all around Los Angeles to find the dangerous drug dealer who killed his partner. When’s Stu’s life is put in danger, he decides to stay with the brutish police officer to make sure that he stays alive long enough to finally confess his love to his platonic girlfriend.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this comedic premise, and individually Nanjiani and Bautista have been very funny in other projects, but the writing here is exceedingly bland and neither actor brings enough to the table to compensate. Tonally, the film struggles to balance between hard-R action violence and the type of care-free slapstick that’s supposed to glide through the same brutal shootings and botched drug deals. One gets the feeling that if Shane Black (“Lethal Weapon,” “The Nice Guys”) had helmed this picture, that these two genre worlds might have blended with a little more grace and ease, and we might have been given better dialogue and characters to care about.

Nanjiani is usually good at playing sad-sacks and misunderstood know-it-alls, and that’s pretty much what he’s asked to do here, but the pitch of the dialogue is so out of tune with the performance that he often comes off as whiney and entitled, even as he’s dodging bullets and screaming for his life.

Bautista finds a neutral, stone-faced tone that works for most scenes, but he’s so committed to the wounded cop performance that when the movie needs to go to sillier places, he doesn’t always fit in.

“Stuber” is a missed opportunity — another Hollywood big-budget comedy that fails due to a heavy reliance on the preconceived star-power of the actors and not enough care that went into the writing process. There are occasional moments that work on screen, including a somewhat inspired moment when Stu gets relationship advice from a male stripper, but unfortunately these moments are so few and far between that they only highlight what the film is lacking throughout.

Grade: C-

Cassidy Robinson is a former Idaho State University student with a master’s degree in film studies from Orange County’s Chapman University. He is currently working as a media journalist in Los Angeles, California.