Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

When Super Pumped heightens its reality and embraces the absurd, it smartly comes across more as a dark successor to 500 Days Of Summer than a Fincher rip-off. It’s a credit to Gordon-Levitt that he’s able to pull off the same feat he did in 500 Days, keeping the core of the character true throughout wild tonal shifts, and making our protagonist compelling enough to invest in his journey despite being despicable.

Other than a few times when the form of the show itself feels a bit too manic, “Super Pumped” is just entertaining drama.

"Super Pumped" effectively illustrates that while such personalities might not be great to live with (or even share a ride with), as movies or limited series go, they can be pretty fascinating to watch.

Echoes of “The Social Network” reverberate throughout this slick, cool, darkly funny albeit somewhat superficial anthology.

The first "Super Pumped" installment approaches its ripped-from-the-headlines story correctly, and Gordon-Levitt is great.

The first two episodes are fueled by sneers, bombast, hard rock and dialogue that tries a little too hard to replicate the “A million dollars isn’t cool. ... But then the supporting characters — starting with Travis’s first major investor, Bill Gurley (Kyle Chandler) — emerge, and “Super Pumped” becomes much more humane, coherent and watchable.

Super Pumped is imperfect, but it's mostly successful. It's a fast-paced and entertaining story of an Icarus you can't wait to see fall.

Gurley plays with fire in “The Battle for Uber,” which is often more intriguing than it is purely entertaining. Much of the dialogue arrives as speechifying, whether or not someone is giving a speech. ... It’s the Gurley-Kalanick story, though, that gives narrative muscle to “Uber,” which plays with our expectations and maybe even has a moral.

Once you get past the initial insufferable hump at the series’ start, it becomes a guilty, addictive watch, not unlike watching self-centered wealthy people on reality shows dedicated to them.

The series resists the urge to humanise Travis’s selfishness, but it also fails to extrapolate what super pumped guys like Travis mean for Silicon Valley and the rest of us. The result is low-calorie entertainment of the highest order, as flashy and empty as Travis’s self-serving rallying cry.

This is a show about boardroom violence; it can be fun to watch until it gets redundant, or numbing.

At its best, Super Pumped pokes at the dubious ethics of Silicon Valley – even the guys ostensibly trying to do the right thing, such as Gurley’s determination to allow drivers to collect tips, are ultimately focused on the bottom line. But it’s a discordant, tiring watch.

Super Pumped makes the case that figures like Kalanick pride themselves on pushing boundaries so much that they decide boundaries don’t need to exist. And that’s interesting to explore, up to a point. But exploring that flawed, morally unmoored worldview also results in regurgitating messages that TV shows and movies about the business world have been telegraphing for decades.

The TV equivalent of a tech bro. Watching it is like attending a business meeting that refuses to end, attended by self-styled junior masters of the universe who won’t shut up.

“Super Pumped” can’t figure out what it’s about — an occupational hazard, perhaps, of taking as a subject a company whose offenses are so multifarious, and one that was founded and led by a person whose whole thing is relentless ambition without mitigating nuance. The show finally finds something of a groove in telling the story of Susan Fowler (Eva Victor), the engineer who helped to expose a culture of sexual harassment within Uber.

Fueled by anger more than insights, it doesn’t seem built to provide a fresh spin on greed and power in the 21st century, or how Kalanick’s quest mirrors technology giants’ invasive, self-serving business practices. Those elements are there, but they’re sped by in favor of chronicling events already recounted elsewhere.

Once all of the mania settles down and we get into the meat of the story about Kalanick’s fight to get Uber established and grow it into what it is today we actually got bored.

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.