Day Shift (2022)

Pretending to be a freelance pool cleaner, Bud Jablonski (Jamie Foxx) is actually a freelance vampire hunter, selling the teeth of the undead for profit (and no, the film never explains how this system actually works, or who is buying the stuff). He once was a union vampire hunter but was thrown out of the organization for irresponsible behaviour.

Because our hero is just that kind of a guy, he’s also separated from his family, not for lack of love but because he’s irresponsible and uses his work as an excuse for his absenteeism. Though I am not too sure the film actually understands this. Also, he never had the vampire talk with his wife Jocelyn (Meagan Good) and little daughter Paige (Zion Broadnax). Right now, Jocely threatens to move away unless Bud can come up with enough money for Paige’s school tuition and braces. Apparently, you only learn you have to pay five thousand dollars tuition a week before they come due.

Clearly, the only way to solve these problems is to get back into the vampire hunter’s union, which Bud manages with the help of mythical vampire hunter Big John Elliott (Snoop Dogg, who is pretty awesome in this one). Of course, the union boss hates Bud and insists on desk jock Seth (Dave Franco) accompanying and watching him.

Which becomes particularly difficult because Bud has killed the actual daughter of budding master vampire Audrey (Karla Souza), who does not take well to this sort of thing.

From moment to moment, there’s fun to be had in the series of unthinkingly deployed clichés director J.J. Perry calls a movie. You can certainly see the extensive experience Perry has with stunt work, and get quite a few good to great action set pieces (which is more than you can say about the clearly much more costly The Gray Man which also comes to us via Netflix like this one), as if someone had thrown a bit of money to a direct to video action movie. Which at the very least keeps the film from ever becoming boring. In fact, once the triple action sequence climax starts, things become downright entertaining to watch, with well choreographed action filmed with vigour and without permanent cutting away.

All of which would make for a pretty awesome piece of horror comedy action cinema if not for a terrible script that can only ever think of anything as a set-up of a joke but doesn’t understand that your world building can only be a decent basis for jokes when it actually hangs together. That doesn’t mean it can’t be absurd – see something like the Men in Black films for how to do it right – but once your world only seems to be the set-up for jokes, those jokes should at the very least be pretty good. Day Shift believes a guy repeatedly pissing himself when he encounters vampires to be the epitome of humour, and so has its problems distracting from the fact that its world makes little sense, its characters are buddy cop movie clichés without any changes made to them and certainly no development, and that its plot can’t seem to focus for a second. How shoddy is the plotting? The film plays the old “the bad guy blackmailed this pretty woman to get close to our hero” card with a character Bud has met exactly one time before her “betrayal”.

Particularly painful is the late movie revelation that vampires in this world don’t actually have to murder people and still keep free will and their old personalities. Which, if you – unlike writers Tyler Tice and Shay Hatten – think about it for a second, means Bud is randomly murdering potentially innocent people for their teeth for a living.

Yet, there are still these very fun fights (including a cameo by house favourite Scott Adkins) keeping Day Shift generally watchable and entertaining.

In short: Collateral (2004)

If nothing else, this Michael Mann joint about a taxi driver (Jamie Foxx) becoming the unwilling chauffeur and unlikely fall guy for a professional killer (Tom Cruise) on a five stop murder tour of police informers through LA does prove that good direction and excellent acting is absolutely all that is needed to turn a bizarre, overconstructed and deeply implausible script into a highly engaging movie.

The film’s plot is a melange of improbable happenstance and stupid plans by supposed “professionals” that would make quite a few giallos look completely realistic. However, as with the giallo, realism and believability really aren’t the point here. Instead, Mann creates a world out of his patented amassing of plausible feeling details (which are often total hogwash in actual reality, but no matter) and a visual style that goes all in for a very digital look when that wasn’t a thing most serious directors who could afford any better tried, where all the theoretical nonsense makes total emotional and thematic sense in practice. Because it’s all in a day’s work for Mann even on a bad day, he squeezes in quite a few fantastic action and suspense scenes into the cracks of his the tale of a man losing all of his illusions and finding strength through it, starring Los Angeles by night as the perfect metaphor for the modern world. Going by the critical consensus of the time, he also made pretty much everyone watching happy with it.

While Mann is working his magic, he not only gets the expectedly great performances out of Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith and Mark Ruffalo (doing the most Michael Mann movie cop character imaginable), but also a less awkward performance out of Cruise than most directors get when asking him to act instead of to star. In these cases, the problem usually isn’t that Cruise isn’t trying but that he’s trying so visibly to rise to the occasion, ironically seeming to lack the self-confidence to really be in the role instead of playing it. Here, there’s still a bit of the stiffness this often produces, but there are many scenes where Cruise actually nails the character in a natural and fluent way.

Three Films Make A Post: The old flesh is dead, long live the new!

Darklands (1996): What starts out as if it could become a considerably interesting piece of post-industrial folk horror (the sub-sub genre still waiting on its day) becomes less and less so the longer it goes on, the film wasting some promising ideas on occult conspiracy by the numbers plotting. On paper highly interesting elements like the connection between a “back to our Celtic roots” right-wing politician and a revived druid cult are wasted on barely competent suspense scenes; the filmmakers clearly didn’t do any research on actual pagan practices and most certainly couldn’t come up with anything exciting on their own. The conspiracy plot only manages to remind one of films who are much better at this sort of thing. There’s really little there apart from the initial promise, this being the first Welsh horror movie or not.

Project Power (2020): On one hand, I really think superhero cinema could use more of Henry Joost’s and Ariel Schulman’s focus on POC characters, and featuring among others a plot line that’s explicitly about empowering a young, poor, black teenager is a fine thing to have in this sort of thing. But the film’s not terribly good at integrating these aspirations into its more typical superpowered business, the action movie parts never feeling actually informed by the rest of the film. It doesn’t help that the film is one of those films that believe replacing superhero tropes with action movie tropes somehow makes its view of the world more realistic, when in fact, it’s just blowing up its body count.

Generally, the film has a bit of a meandering quality, its plot lines taking too long to come together (and I would argue that excising Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character completely would have cost the film nothing but an actor working below his abilities), and the big dramatic beats never quite having the heft the film seems to think they do.

Visually, the Netflix production is a bit of a middling affair where ugly colour schemes meet competent but often slightly bland action.

Ava (2020): Also perfectly watchable but not exactly great (or even good) is Tate Taylor’s tale of a killer for a weird organization with the least believable procedure finding herself in the crosshairs of her own people while also trying to solve some family business I could care less about. The cast – with Jessica Chastain, John Malkovich, Geena Davis, Common and Colin Farrell among others – is great, but the script loves to go through the most generic plot beats available at any given time, leaving these poor people to pretend the way that organization does business (from its boss doing business at his home next to his playing children to the bizarre assassination plans) makes any kind of sense even for an action movie or allude to not terribly interesting backstories.


All of this would be perfectly forgivable if the action were actually impressive, or the family drama all that riveting, but the former is competent (with action-inexperienced Chastain sometimes struggling to go into the action heroine poses) at best, the latter simply not very interesting.

In short: Miami Vice (2006)

The least subtle undercover cops alive, Crockett (Colin Farrell letting his hair and whatever that stuff growing on his face is do the acting this time around) and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx, woefully underused despite being the more interesting character with room for a deeper character arc and being simply less stilted in his role) are roped into an investigation concerning a mysterious big time drug operator after one of their former informants gets killed working on the case. In between shoot-outs, shots of Farrell rubbing his neck and head ponderously, and various explosions, Crockett also falls in Instant Big Lust with Isabella (Gong Li), one of the leading heads of the cartel they are investigating.

Like all the mainstream film critics that heaped praise on this film, I’m a big admirer of most of the oeuvre of Michael Mann, but this movie version of Mann’s old stomping grounds, the 80s cop show Miami Vice, leaves me decidedly cold. For the most part, it is because most of Mann’s standard tricks don’t work for me here. He’s perhaps trying his usual thing of adding veracity to a highly improbable script by providing many layers of absolutely realistic feeling details, but all of these details don’t really add up to any reality here, but just add more mannerisms to an already incredibly mannered and over-stylized film, making things not less but more antiseptic.


It doesn’t help the film at all that its script (by Mann and co-TV-Miami Vice-veteran Anthony Yerkovich) seems to work from a “Miami Vice plot elements” checklist, where every big beat of the show needs to be included in some way, turning the whole affair clumsy and ponderous where leanness would probably have helped. But then, leanness has never been part of the Mann approach. This is also the kind of film that becomes basically paralyzed by all of the clichés and tropes it needs to somehow stuff into its running time, so Crockett gets to hear the “in too deep” speech about twenty minutes into the case, and he and Isabella basically jump each other the moment they lay eyes on each other. Who cares that it doesn’t make sense for the kinds of people they are supposed to be, or that Farrell and Gong have no on-screen chemistry whatsoever despite the film’s permanent visual insistence that this is The Big Thing. And don’t get me started on how stupid everyone in the film needs to be to let things play out like they do here. Again, these are not problems new to Mann’s work, but usually, he’s telling his tales of moody macho men embedded in what feels like a (not necessarily the) real world in which they and their troubles actually belong. Here, it’s just the posing of emotionally stunted assholes typical of bad high budget action cinema in front of slick backgrounds without substance or emotional resonance relating them to actual human feelings. And when it comes to high budget action, there are simply better choices for a viewer.

In short: Robin Hood (2018)

This godawful thing directed by Otto Bathurst is a sad attempt at making the Robin Hood legend “topical”. So expect crusaders in the Middle East carrying their bows as if they were assault rifles while wearing armour that’s meant to look like modern combat armour, our main character wearing a leather hoodie that makes him look rather a lot like the TV version of a certain Robin Hood inspired superhero, and a lot more in the spirit of an idiot’s idea of modernist theatre. Now, this sort of thing can be perfectly interesting – if perhaps not exactly what I’d want from a Robin Hood movie – if written with thought and care, but the responsible parties for the script, Ben Chandler and David James Kelly, treat their conceit with all the thoughtfulness and care of elephants waltzing through a porcelain store, never having encountered a thought they’d be able to actually follow through on.

Because this isn’t bad enough, the film’s plot is, absurdly enough, full of the worst attempts at your typical superhero movie’s narrative beats I’ve seen in quite some time, because obviously, it’s not enough for this one to be a shitty message movie, it also needs to be a really bad medieval superhero movie, too, with dialogue so bad, I started to fondly think about the Daredevil movie with Ben “I can’t do superheroes for the life of me” Affleck as the much superior film.


But hey, at least there’s some spectacle on screen, right? Well, unfortunately not, for Bathurst shoots the whole mess as if it actually were the amateur theatre production its writing reminds me of (probably mumbling something about Brechtian techniques), having never encountered a set he can’t make look like cardboard, and no action scene he can’t turn into nonsense by always choosing the least effective set-up, the worst camera angle, and so on and so forth. It’s honestly astonishing to me how a production that’s made by an actual production company and a director with experience in properly budgeted modern TV can look quite this shoddy. Need I even mention that the actors make the impression of having gotten no direction at all, so their performances meander wildly, with only Jamie Foxx actually giving the impression of playing the same character from scene to scene?