Netflix can do it all. Producing some of the most interesting and even subversive adult and complex films of recent years. And also, to launch its pre-production algorithm, a factory of highly processed audiovisual content to end up creating some of the season’s most embarrassing nonsense, which also stars more or less fallen stars. The latest example of this hodgepodge of earlier bad ideas (calling them referees would be a compliment) is Day Shift, a vampire action comedy directed by newcomer JJ Perry and whose cast is commanded by a dejected Jamie Foxx.
With this series-ready behavior, it seems mandatory to (supposedly) start with a strong opening sequence that doesn’t force you to rethink, and therefore continue to track recreational food with the platform’s search engine. But in these early minutes, no matter how high they are in terms of sound, the inability of the architects can usually be guessed at. That’s what happens in Day Shift with the introduction of its main character: a pool cleaner from Los Angeles, a father of a separated family in the process of divorce who spends his days killing some beings who call themselves vampires but can resemble vampires, and you never know what your goal is. It sounds like bullshit, and it is, but sometimes goofy movies can have a refreshing sense of the Dionysian, and other times they can be just as stupid as they appear from afar.
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Day Shift aims to be simultaneously an action comedy, a B-movie horror, a family film with silly intentions, a fight and kung fu production, and a buddy film with contrasting character roles and distant physical anomalies. The obvious feeling is that it’s not satisfied with a particular audience arc; He wants to get them all together, level them at the bottom, and he probably won’t have any left.
Perhaps the least demanding will be satisfied with its action sequences, martial arts fights and close-range shots with offensive weapons, shot in any case without the slightest imagination, but at least discreetly professionally within the contemporary Hollywood order. Yet while a certain beauty can be conceded to his photographs with contrasting colors, there is no doubt that the dialogues are being conducted by someone just beginning to walk the typeface. Or perhaps someone whose wings and imagination are being cut off by the offices. The three minutes of banalities, repetitions and platitudes of the initial conversation between Foxx’s character and his wife, about his bad job as a father and the mother and daughter’s possible move to Florida, is the best example. Mostly because Foxx, a good actor in his bad hours, aware of the phrases he must declassify, devotes himself to the task of making high school gestural winks unworthy of a performer of his caliber.
A film of noise and honey, with an ideology without any idea, Day Shift is another of the various operations to systematize calculations offered to the viewer from the platform. The algorithm, supposed expert in solving leisure problems, who rarely understands cinema.
day shift
Address: JJ Perry.
Interpreter: Jamie Foxx, Dave Franco, Meagan Good, Karla Souza.
Gender: Comedy. United States, 2022.
Duration: 113 minutes.
Platform: Netflix.
Premiere: 12.8.
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