Summary
Die Hard + Lethal Weapon + Blade = Day Shift. The ideal Friday Night movie.
Jamie Foxx is a working-class guy struggling to make ends meet. His estranged wife wants to move across the country with his daughter unless he can prove that he is able to make ends meet and pay for her school and braces. He has just one week to raise $10,000, or his wife and daughter move to Florida.
In these hard times, where everyone has a side hustle, Bud Jablowski’s (Foxx) predicament is far from unique. I mean, who doesn’t have a side hustle these days? Whether that be moonlighting as a film critic or as a vampire hunter, it’s a tough gig to keep all the plates spinning and keep your family fed and watered.
As you may have inferred, Fox’s Bud is, in addition to his day job as a pool cleaner, a badass vampire hunter. In order to raise the requisite funds to keep his family together, he must swallow his pride and rejoin the union of vampire hunters. A condition of which is to be paired with James Franco’s (the thinking viewer’s Franco Brother) Seth, creating a classic odd couple, buddy comedy style dynamic. Franco is all regulations and rules and Foxx knows what it takes to really survive.
The easy, PR-friendly strap line for Day Shift would be Die Hard + Lethal Weapon + Blade = Day Shift, and frankly, that’s not far from the end result here. Day Shift leans into its influences and unapologetically delivers a movie that would have been at home in the late eighties/early nineties action movie heyday. It’s high concept, wise-cracking, action-packed fun.
A lot of the movie’s success rests on the shoulders of the well-wardrobed Foxx, who possesses the charisma of an 80’s vintage Bruce Willis (but much better dressed) and carries this movie with old-school Movie Star panache. The way that he carries himself throughout this movie prompts the viewer to ask perhaps the most pertinent question of our time: why isn’t Jamie Foxx the biggest movie star on the planet right now? Seriously, he looks great, talks great, and does all the movie star things. Give this guy all the roles.
Day Shift is likely to get buried in your Netflix queue, so if the algorithm doesn’t serve it to you, give it a search. This is the perfect Friday night movie: dumb, action-packed, and loads of fun. If my opinion isn’t enough and you need any more persuasion, allow me to leave you with this nugget: Snoop Dogg mows down a room of vampires with a Gatling gun. If that isn’t entertainment, I don’t know what is.
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