Jamie Foxx’s Vampire-Slaying Pool Cleaner Is a Cry for Help
It’s easy to imagine first-time director J.J. Perry and screenwriters Tyler Tice and Shay Hatten in the pitch meeting for Day Shift, selling it as a Lethal Weapon riff with hungry vampires and John Wick ultra-violence. All of which is to say, there’s absolutely nothing novel about this Netflix B-movie (Aug. 12), whose lack of originality is only dwarfed by its failure to inject even a fleeting dose of humor into its wannabe-comedic horror carnage.
Headlined by Jamie Foxx, here stuck in one-note badass mode, Day Shift is set in a Los Angeles populated by both the living and the undead, although the former—despite knowing about vampires, as proven by references to the Twilight franchise—are completely unaware that the latter are in their midst. No matter that ignorance, bloodsuckers are lurking practically everywhere, nesting in abandoned bowling alleys and shopping malls and even walking around during the day courtesy of Audrey (Karla Souza). A star San Fernando Valley realtor and ancient “uber vamp,” Audrey is buying up the area’s properties in order to populate them with her minions, whom she’s also empowering with a heavy-duty lotion that lets them survive in the radiant sunshine. Alas, what goes into this protective balm is a mystery never revealed by the film, regardless of the fact that its entire narrative ostensibly hinges on its application.
Such screenwriting sketchiness is part and parcel of this mirthless affair, whose primary focus is Bud Jablonski (Foxx), an L.A. local introduced cleaning a filthy residential pool. Once his work is done, Bud exposes his true identity as a covert vampire-slayer on the hunt for fresh prey. He finds that in an elderly monster living in a nondescript house, resulting in the first of many prolonged tussles involving Bud’s trusty shotgun and handgun, plenty of highly choreographed hand-to-hand combat, and a bevy of limb-cracking, back-breaking maneuvers on the part of Bud’s supernatural adversary. Director Perry stages this mayhem with lucidity and muscularity if minimal verve; the entire thing comes across like a third-generation photocopy of multiple things Keanu Reeves and Wesley Snipes have done before, all of them blended up in a vain attempt to mask the spectacle’s derivativeness.