Day Shift
One of the most striking Netflix releases for this month of August is ‘Day Shift‘, a horror comedy starring Jamie Foxx giving life to a family man who leads a double life. By day he works as a pool cleaner, but his real work comes at night as a vampire hunter.
On paper, ‘Day Shift’ promised to be a hobby as wild as it is fun and end up among the best Netflix movies of 2022-, but, unfortunately, the reality ends up being something different. Yes, he does arouse some sympathy and one never gets bored, but he never manages to fully squeeze what he proposes and ends up staying in a throwaway entertainment instead of a memorable title.
Virtues and limitations of ‘Day Shift’
The truth is that ‘Day Shift’ is a film that oscillates at all times between the simple and the basic. The script by Tyler Tice and Shay Hatten (‘Army of the Dead’) does propose some rather curious ideas, especially in relation to that union of vampire hunters that brings the protagonist upside down, but then he does not have much interest in develop it beyond a handful of jokes of irregular effectiveness.
Here the indisputable axis is the character of Foxx and the compromised situation in which he is that could lead him to lose his family. There ‘Day Shift’ seeks to find that emotional factor necessary to give the film a little more depth, but it is here where everything is more basic. Everything that could be expected from a plot of these characteristics is there, also presented in a quite obvious way and without offering anything to the viewer so that he really cares about what is still the fundamental axis of the story.
Luckily, the presence of humor is a constant and that makes ‘Day Shift’ much more bearable, both when it comes to more typical solutions, such as the fact that Dave Franco’s character is an office rat with zero programming experience. field, as when looking for something more distinctive, here I think mainly of the rare but effective appearances of Snoop Dogg as a highly respected vampire hunter who owes one to the protagonist. There he does achieve a certain balance to avoid becoming burdensome, something that at some point I feared might happen.
It is also true that this causes the most terrifying aspect of ‘Day Shift’ to be diluted, being reduced to very specific moments and turning the threat of vampires into something more typical of an action movie. Be careful, this also leaves some joy like that huge battle in which two brothers participate in fiction, one of them played by Scott Adkins.
It is precisely in the moments of action where the fact that ‘Day Shift’ has a director is more noticeable, because, at times, it almost seems to want to get closer to being an heir to ‘John Wick’. I’m left wondering if those scenes are shot by JJ Perry or the second unit crew, but that’s where the film has some bold staging solutions.
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Then it is true that it does not have the continuity necessary for them to shine globally -perhaps with the exception of the one already mentioned, where the only downside is that it may be too long-, but that is where one can momentarily think that we are facing something More than just a silly thing to hang out with.
Flying low
For the rest, the film does not stand out visually, coming quite close to the Netflix look of worrying more about how it looks good on the most used devices to view its content than about developing its own identity. In other facets, too, there is no special concern because it really looks like a 100-million-dollar movie – how is it possible that this is more expensive than the great ‘Bullet Train’? -, because not even the special effects are very successful.
And it is not because he does not have the opportunity, that on more than one occasion he draws dialogues to explain the different types of vampires that his protagonists have to face, something that should have been used more when he shows them on screen. In the end, when it comes to creatures, quantity is more important than anything else.
What we are left with in the end is a film driven by the presence of a much more inspired and convincing Foxx than in ‘Project Power’, his previous film on Netflix, the right dose of simple but effective humor and the punctual successes in the scenes of action. Of course, I wish I had more than that -at least try to have a little more personality-, but in this case, it is enough to see it and not regret having done it.
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In short
‘Day Shift’ promised to be better than it really is, but at least it’s not another one of those downright bad Netflix movies. All in all, you can see if you want to throw yourself on the sofa, enjoy the air conditioning and forget about the tremendous heat outside for a while, because it doesn’t do much more.
