JP Nunez
I’m a huge fan of vampires. They’re hands down my favorite human-sized monsters, so when I saw the trailer for Day Shift, I immediately put the film on my to-watch list. Sure, it’s a Netflix original, and the streaming service doesn’t have a very good track record with their movies, but the trailer looked really good. It promised a hilarious horror comedy with great vampire action, so I thought this one had potential.
Day Shift was directed by J. J. Perry, and it stars Jamie Foxx, Dave Franco, Snoop Dogg, Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Meagan Good, Karla Souza, Steve Howey, and Scott Adkins. It’s set in a world where a secret union of vampire hunters rids the world of undead bloodsuckers, and one of their former members, a man named Bud Jablonski, needs to get back in.
His ex-wife and his daughter are about to move to another state, so he has to rejoin the union in order to make enough money to help them pay their bills and stay close to him. Luckily, the union takes him back, but they assign a rep named Seth to follow him around and make sure he follows all the rules and regulations. Seth is a bookish nerd who’s not at all suited for field work, so as he and Bud go out and hunt vampires together, they form a fairly standard, almost Zombieland-esque comedy duo.
Day Shift opens with Bud hunting and killing a vamp, and the action in this scene is awesome. The choreography is almost John Wick-like (which is no surprise given the film’s premise), and the vampires move in a really cool way. They’re played by contortionists and Cirque du Soleil performers, so they bend, contort, and jump around way more than your average bloodsuckers. It’s all really cool, so when I saw this scene, I was sure I was going to like the film.
But I was wrong. After that riveting opening, Day Shift slows down and focuses on the characters and the story for a while, and unfortunately, these elements are simply not up to par. For starters, the plot is very by the numbers. There are a few twists and turns, but for the most part, it’s pretty much what you’d expect from the premise. It’s a fairly standard vampire hunting story, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it does mean that the movie’s other elements need to pick up the slack and make up for the middling plot. Unfortunately though, they don’t.
For example, the comedy is very hit or miss, and if I’m being honest, it leans far more towards miss than hit. Sure, it has its moments, but they’re very few and far between, so on the whole, I didn’t find myself laughing or even smiling anywhere near as much as I wanted to.
Similarly, the characters are also rather bland and generic. To be fair, the acting is decent enough, and some of it is even pretty good, but nothing about these people really stood out to me as particularly noteworthy. I think they would’ve been fine if the story were more interesting, but they weren’t nearly good enough to carry the film and make up for its pedestrian plot.
Last but not least, we have the vampire action. This is hands down the best thing about Day Shift, and a lot of it is really good even after the great opening. For example, there’s a really cool scene about halfway through where Bud and Seth team up with a pair of vampire hunting brothers who feel almost like they were lifted straight out of the Tracksuit Mafia in the Marvel show Hawkeye, and in my opinion, it’s the best scene in the film. It has everything that made the opening great, but it’s longer, and the extra characters give it a bit more variety as well.
However, even this element was a bit hit or miss for me. While Day Shift is great when it’s showing off its unique brand of vampire action, there are also a bunch of scenes where it feels much more standard and familiar. Most notably, the final showdown between Bud and the main bloodsucker is pretty generic, so the movie doesn’t go out on a particularly strong note.
So, at the end of the day, what’s my overall assessment of this film? To be honest, there’s nothing in it that I found particularly terrible. Pretty much everything about it is decent enough that it would’ve been fine if the rest of the movie had been better, but that’s exactly the problem.
Since everything about the film requires the other elements to be better, it never comes together as a satisfying whole. Sure, the action is pretty fun, but it’s not quite good enough to carry the entire movie. It still needs one other area to rise above the bare-minimum level, but unfortunately, nothing else about the film ever does.
Because of that, I’m sad to say that I probably wouldn’t recommend Day Shift. I’m glad I watched it, but that’s just because I’m a vampire fanatic. I saw the unique vampire action once and enjoyed it, but I don’t feel the need to ever trudge through the mediocrity here to see those scenes again. So, if you love vampires as much as I do, it might be worth a watch (but only once!), but other than that, you’re probably better off looking elsewhere to get your fix of good new horror.
Day Shift is streaming on Netflix right now.
