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.