Mark Reviews Movies: DAY SHIFT

Day Shift, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 12, 2022

Screenwriters Shay Hatten and Tyler Tice seem to believe the premise of Day Shift is its biggest strength. It's not. It's overly familiar, entirely worn out, and more or a less a cliché at this point.

The gimmick involves an ordinary man who just happens to hunt vampires for a living, and the turning point arrives with the introduction of the Guild, a secret organization of vampire-hunters with international reach and a load of bureaucracy. Our renegade, been-there-done-that protagonist is then teamed up with a by-the-books newcomer, as they discover and try to stop a plot that could lead to the ascendancy of the blood-sucking threat. Come to think of it, this movie has at least three premises, and each of them is rote as the others.

The hero is Bud Jablonski (Jamie Foxx), who's a freelance vampire-hunter, disguised as a pool cleaner, at the start of the story. He's just trying to make some quick cash by killing vampires and selling their fangs on the black market in order to pay the bills for his family.

His ex-wife Jocelyn (Meagan Good) is thinking of selling the house and moving from the San Fernando Valley to Florida with the former couple's daughter Paige (Zion Broadnax). Bud promises to get his ex $10,000 to cover their daughter's tuition and the cost of braces for the girl, but in order to make that kind of cash, he'll have to re-join the Guild, a group that rescinded his membership years ago on account of his routine breaches of protocol.

The setup is mostly an excuse for action, which is typified by an opening brawl between Bud and a vampire that amounts to a lot of contorting and plenty of rag doll-like tossing, and comedy, which uses the story's familiar foundations—the wearily self-aware protagonist and the pairing of mismatched partners—for equally recognizable bits of humor. If the obvious jokes aren't enough of a giveaway as to the low amount of thought put into doing something different with the material, director J.J. Perry and editor Paul Harb sometimes seem to have difficulty even assembling the basic structure of setup and punch line.

There are brief moments here when Bud responds to Seth (Dave Franco), the regulations-minded desk jockey who's put into the field to keep an eye on the troublemaker, with a one-liner that doesn't match the context of the setup. It's as if Foxx and Franco were instructed to improvise some banter.

Since the dynamics of their characters are so confused (In theory, Franco's guy has some power over Bud, since the latter's career could be ended with a single report from Seth, but instead, Seth is played as bumbling, mousy, and wholly docile), there simply aren't many jokes to be found in their relationship. Perry seems to have taken the "best" of their improv, giving us statements that are, hence, neither setups nor punch lines. Other comic beats in the action fall flat because of a similar issue, such as when a vampire throws Bud up some stairs. His pronouncement of disbelief at the irony is delayed for some cuts to Seth and a pair of vampire-killing brothers (played by Steve Howey and Scott Adkins, who get to show off elaborate fight choreography that's a quick burst of inspiration—until it just becomes ridiculously unbelievable) respectively getting pummeled by obliterating some vampires.

The plot, which is just as much of a throwaway conceit as everything else here, involves Audrey (Karla Souza), an elder among the vampires, and her attempts to both buy up some land and mass produce a sunscreen that will allow the blood-suckers to operate during the day. It doesn't really matter, except that it provides Bud something to fight, his family a chance to be used as a couple of distressed damsels, a change in Seth that's at least a bit clever (although it's obvious the filmmakers are hoping for a sequel to do anything of value with the shift, as well as with Natasha Bordizzo's neighbor-with-a-secret), and a big, climactic showdown in an underground temple and cavern system. It's the generic kind of climax we'd expect from a movie that wastes both Snoop Dogg as Big John, a vampire-killing cowboy, and Peter Stormare as Bud's fang-buying contact.

The story, characters, and hook of Day Shift amount to a medley of formulaic ideas. The movie's alternately routine and incompetent execution, though, makes it almost entirely disposable.

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