Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber Review: A Redundant Start-Up Story

The first chapter of Showtime’s anthology series Super Pumped, titled The Battle for Uber, is full of boardroom shouting matches and subterfuge, press scandals, and people in suits getting mad about enormous sums of money. In this, it reflects the real-life man at its center: Travis Kalanick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who was CEO of Uber during its most explosive period of growth and controversy. He’s a guy who opens job interviews with the pivotal question: “Are you an asshole?” And he expects the answer to be “yes.”

Based on the 2019 book by journalist Mike Isaac, the series opens with Uber, when it was still called Ubercab, in conflict with limousine and taxi commissions of San Francisco. Travis and his lackeys stoke protests in the street, slyly tweak the company name, and force a sit-down with the mayor. They manage to frame Uber as the underdog, striving to give drivers independence from the companies that have a stranglehold on the city’s transportation.

Of course, there’s no altruistic motive at work here. Travis is opportunistic to the core, meaning that he recognizes the momentary leverage that will give him the edge to get what he wants. Perhaps needless to say, few episodes of The Battle for Uber pass before he’s trying to drive rideshare competitors out of business and ax the incentives that initially lured in drivers.

Given the sheer number of controversies that The Battle for Uber tackles, it doesn’t have to scramble for material to fill its hour-long episodes. But the series is awkwardly split between a broader look at Uber and a bog-standard rise-and-fall narrative. Travis, for one, is your run-of-the-mill tech-bro, at once shallow and callous. Driven by egotism, paranoia, and entitlement, he’s exactly the sort of man who will ditch his girlfriend for someone younger and more impressed with his bona fides. Though Gordon-Levitt gets no shortage of showy monologues, Travis scarcely registers beyond the single note of dialed-up smarm that the role demands.

Elsewhere, venture capitalist Bill Gurley (Kyle Chandler) comes off like a coach trying to rein in a brash star player. Gurley is portrayed as a largely reasonable guy who’s in it for the long haul, though he becomes an adversary in Travis’s eyes, alongside just about everyone else: journalists, prospective investors, Google, Apple, China, and even Uber’s own drivers.

But The Battle for Uber is very much built around Travis’s perspective, to the point where some episodes are pockmarked with depictions of the man’s vapid fantasies and embellishments of the truth. One flashback shows Travis atop the Eiffel Tower, explaining the concept of Uber to his business partner, Garrett Camp (Jon Bass), as they gaze at the headlights that illuminate the Paris streets below, before cutting to what actually happened in reality: that Camp was the one who explained the idea to Travis in a restaurant.

Another sequence finds Travis daydreaming about playing tennis on Wii Sports with Google’s aloof co-founder Larry Page (Ben Feldman), who’s unsure of who Travis even is. The overriding sense of capital-A attitude that mark these digressions is consistent with Travis’s abrasive personality, and is further reinforced by the occasional, affected narration that Quentin Tarantino liberally laces with the word “motherfucker.”

Combined with a litany of text pop-ups and cutaways that wouldn’t feel out of place in a YouTube video, the series and its comedic leanings are most plainly indebted to The Big Short. One episode even includes direct narration into the camera from an overworked driver (Mousa Hussein Kraish) and a woman (Eva Victor) subjected to rampant sexual harassment at the Uber offices. The series is smart to broaden its scope and focus, albeit too briefly, on the problems of these peripheral characters, but it’s hard not to wish that the writers did so in some manner that doesn’t involve a character telling the camera, “TLDR, I’m like a techie Marie Kondo.”

When it’s not using such devices to liven up boardroom arguments and montages like one detailing Uber’s business expansion, The Battle for Uber lumbers through the usual bullet points of TV shows based on true stories. Travis’s and Bill’s psychologies manifest in their various heart-to-hearts with women who might easily be credited as “His Wife” or “His Girlfriend” or “His Mother.” The cast is an amorphous blob of characters who change little over an unclear period of time, an impression that’s complicated by the rotating door of actors playing tech big shots who clash with Travis from all sides. Whatever massaging has gone into coherently dramatizing this story never feels like enough. Travis often goes on about how the Uber app is meant to be a “frictionless” experience, but this misshapen series is anything but.