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Day Shift

Day Shift

The latest of Netflix's latest productions features a pool attendant who kills vampires and an apprentice who pees himself at the mere thought.

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What do we get if we throw a little bit of Lost Boys, a big scoop of Fright Night, a drop of 21 Jump Street, and a splash of Pineapple Express into a Netflix-owned blender? Day Shift, the latest of lavish Netflix Originals in which an uninspired Jamie Foxx hunts vampires in a sun-soaked Los Angeles. Foxx plays Bud, a superficially unsuccessful, newly divorced pool attendant who runs around a sweltering San Fernando Valley in his rusty pickup truck scooping up dead creatures from people's mismanaged backyard pools. He has a shaky relationship with his ex-wife, to say the least, and misses parent-teacher conferences and training sessions with his seven-year-old daughter. Things don't go well for Bud at first. He's painted as that clichéd father who doesn't succeed at anything he sets out to do and struggles against the odds with everything in his life.

Day Shift
The best thing about Foxx's character "Bud" is his hilarious floral print shirts.

What we do get to see after the intro to Day Shift, however, is that Bud Jablonski is a prominent, rock-hard, seasoned vampire hunter who uses his job as a "pool attendant" as an effective and subtle cover for his actual, real job, and within minutes he's already snuck into a nest where a 90-year-old master vampire is just getting ready to sleep the day away, which of course leads to fighting, gunfire, blood, broken bones and death.

I like Jamie Foxx, I always have. He's brilliant in Django Unchained, brilliant in Collateral and brilliant in Ray, but in this film he has genuine problems carrying the key scenes on his own shoulders and it's not really until Dave Franco's obsessive neurotic sidekick Seth steps into the picture that Day Shift takes off and feels fun and not crushingly stiff. Franco does the exact same role here that he's done numerous times before (including in the underrated Unfinished Business) and it fits him like a glove. He's jumpy, nervous, on the verge of a breakdown at all times and in this film he pisses himself at the mere sight of a vampire, even though it's part of his daily job description.

Day Shift
Snoop Dogg makes a really pale effort here as cowboy Big John.
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That said, the dynamic between Foxx and Franco is far from perfect and Jamie is not funny here, at all. Not once and although his character is more stoic and harsh, there are definitely set-ups from Franco and others to be comedic, but it's kind of too far in for Foxx, unfortunately. Snoop Dogg's character as the even more lecherous vampire hunter and former colleague Big John is neither funny nor nuancedly interesting, rather he's a cliché whose lines feel so easy to forget that his atrocious cowboy attire seems the only memorable thing about him.

Day Shift
Franco is mostly the payoff with Day Shift as well as the fact that Boyka actor Scott Adkins kicks vampire butt, too.

Day Shift is not good. But it's funny, sometimes. The humour, once delivered, is very reminiscent of that in 21 and 22 Jump Street (the films with Tatum and Hill) and that's a positive thing, as far as I'm concerned. The action scenes are also fun and nonsensical with lots of blood and lots of vampires but it's a shame that the villain feels super flat and that the vampires themselves never feel deadly or dangerous. There are clearly better vampire comedies and clearly better action comedies but with that said, Day Shift is not worthless.

05 Gamereactor UK
5 / 10
overall score
is our network score. What's yours? The network score is the average of every country's score

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Day Shift

Day Shift

MOVIE REVIEW. Written by Petter Hegevall

The latest of Netflix's latest productions features a pool attendant who kills vampires and an apprentice who pees himself at the mere thought.



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