Day Shift
Director: J.J. Perry
Writer: Tyler Tice, Shay Hatten
Cast: Jamie Foxx, Dave Franco, Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Meagan Good, Karla Souza, Steve Howey, Scott Adkins, Oliver Masucci, Snoop Dogg, Eric Lange, Peter Stormare, Zion Broadnax
Seen on: 28.10.2022

Plot:
Bud (Jamie Foxx) is a vampire hunter – though that is not something his ex-wife Jocelyn (Meagan Good) and daugther Paige (Zion Broadnax) know. They think he works as a pool cleaner. When Jocelyn tells him that she is thinking about moving to Florida with Paige to be able to offer her more, Bud is unwilling to accept this. He promises to get the necessary money for all the expenses until Monday. But even though you can make good money hunting vampires, Bud has been blacklisted from the Union – and without it, it’s damn hard. But Bud is determined to do it, getting tangled up in something big along the way.

Day Shift does nothing we haven’t seen before in a story we know so well, we could probably finish the script after having watched the first couple of scenes. But it’s nevertheless rather entertaining in its familiarity.

Day Shift treads familiar ground, though I will give it some credit for staging a vampire film in glaring sunshine, at least for a while. Not that the film does much with that set-up. But then again, it doesn’t do much with any of its components, so fair’s fair. Those components include a more than competent cast and a good feeling for action, so even when the banter is predictable and the story moves along very visible tracks, it never gets boring.

Although I do have to wonder at the sheer number of films were quasi-divorced men take it upon themselves to prove themselves as not entirely unreliable, thinking that having a good but heretofore undisclosed reason for their unreliability is enough to make up for it and win back their wives. In most films it is for some reason (that reason most likely being that they were written by men). That was probably the part of the film that worked the least for me.

In any case, it is not a big problem in the grander scheme of this film. To make it a problem, the film would have needed to give it more consideration. But it is more like it was the first thing they could think off to give the film an emotional core, and then they just went with it. And that is pretty much true for everything in the film: as soon as they figured “this could work”, they just left it at that. The resulting film feels almost careless and somewhat limited, never moving past mediocre, albeit entertaining to something really good.

Summarizing: I’ve seen worse, but I feel that it could have been better, too.