Review #281: Day Shift (2022)

Gabe's Supplemental Horror Review #4 - Day Shift (2022)

So, I watched this movie as a double-feature with yesterday's film (Night Shift). The two movies couldn't be more different, but hey, sometimes a similar title is all it takes! (I will recommend to anybody the double-feature of Cube and Circle, as well as Sphere and Triangle, though those pairings make a lot more sense than Night Shift and Day Shift.)

Day Shift is essentially a buddy-cop action/comedy that follows Jamie Foxx as Bud, a vampire hunter in California whose home life has hit a rocky patch and he needs to earn some quick money in a short amount of time or else he's going to lose his daughter. So he joins the local vampire hunters union (with whom he previously burned several metaphorical bridges) and gets stuck with a chaperone in the form of Dave Franco as Seth, a desk jockey who gets pushed into the action. The two of them run afoul of an unholy alliance of vampires and hilarity ensues. Also, Snoop Dogg is in there.

To put it plainly, this movie is... kind of a mess. A good mess, but a mess nonetheless. (Nonethemess?) It seems like it's going to be about an Odd Couple-esque buddy movie with Bud and Seth butting heads (Budding Seths?) about whether to follow the rules or not. And like... that happens, a bit, but in every case Bud just forces his will on Seth and then it never really becomes an issue. There's never a point where Bud gets called out for breaking union rules (apart from the ending when it doesn't matter), there's never a point where the rules impact his ability to accomplish the goal of saving his daughter, there's never even really a point where Seth feels like a significant obstacle that Bud needs to overcome. They argue like once or twice, but every time Bud has a plan and Seth objects to that plan, Bud just says "too bad" and they go along with his plan. I can't tell if the writers actually intended for Seth to feel like an obstacle or if he was just meant to be a running gag, but there were numerous opportunities where it felt like he should have become an obstacle but then the movie just wasn't willing to commit to it. (There's even- spoilers- a point where Seth becomes a vampire, and it literally never is an issue except for the like thirty seconds after it happens.)

I really like the worldbuilding in this movie. Seth is constantly spouting off rules about the vampire hunter's union, history of the vampire clans, mechanics of vampirism and how it affects the various types of vampires out there, and so on- and there's a section where Bud and Seth are working with another pair of vampire hunters to kill an entire nest of vampires and they make such a theatrical performance out of it all, that it really feels like people in this world have developed an art form out of fighting off vampires. As I learned when I watched Army of the Dead a while back, I really like when a well-tread movie genre shows what life would actually be like in a world where these supernatural things exist, and people have had the time to build industry and style around it all.

So this movie earns a lot of points for creative worldbuilding, as well as incredible choreography and fight scenes. This is a bombastic, over-the-top action movie that knows its audience and it wasn't afraid to put a ton of time, work, and money into making sure each vampire fight was memorable. However, it definitely loses a lot of points for seemingly being afraid to make conflict between the main characters and never really letting the danger have any of the stakes that I feel it should.

All in all this is a fun movie, with a lot of spectacle, but I think it would have been better if it took itself just a little bit more seriously and either re-wrote or just removed the character of Seth. It seems obvious what role he was supposed to play in the story but at some point his role got changed or forgotten and nobody caught it until it was too late, and it really detracts from the film as a result. If there was actual conflict between the main characters I could have seen this easily being a 10/10. As it is, it's fun for a casual watch (maybe while you're playing a game on your phone) but not quite what I would call "great".

Overall Rating: 6/10 Bottles of Plot Armor Sunscreen

Hollywood Doesn't Understand Houses: I've got some advice for the characters of this film. If you're so worried about needing money for your daughter's tuition and dental work, instead of risking your life killing vampires to make that $10,000 you need by the end of the week, how about- just maybe- consider selling that giant house? Budd's wife and daughter are living by themselves in what has to be a 4-bedroom home in Los Angeles, which according to Google, would be worth upwards of $2 million. I know Hollywood just can't seem to wrap their head around what an actual middle-class home looks like, but if the plot of the movie is about needing to scrounge together an amount of money, maybe make the amount more than half of one percent of the value of their home?