Day Shift

 You could be excused if you completely discount Day Shift outright as a terrible-looking Netflix action movie. So many red flags: The red N, for a start, yet another modern urban fantasy mashup. Even worse, the tone of the trailer and the jokes... look pretty obnoxious. On the other hand it's directed by stuntman legend JJ Perry, who's been in the business since at least the first Mortal Kombat movie, and was a fight choreographer for Haywire and Undisputed 2; That's one hell of a resumé. And it's pretty safe to say stuntmen turned directors are doing pretty well these days.

 The movie starts well. Jamie Foxx, mid-pool cleaning gig, breaks out a hidden weapons cache, enters the house and picks a fight with the resident vampire. It's a great close-quarters gunplay and martial arts fight, full of cool reversals and great moves. The vampire moves a bit like Linda Blair when she crawled on the ceiling in the exorcist, but on speed, which makes for some nice bone-crunching shots - a cool and very original use of a contortionist in fight choreography.

 Once the fight is done and the scene moves out into mid-day LA, the camera pans up and we get a classic action movie title - it slams into the screen with a bang and there's flames and metal lettering and a stake for an I ... yeah, we're in good hands:

Now THIS is a title sequence.

The very next scene we're introduced to the movie's big bad - a pretty vampire realtor played by Karla Souza who, in the process of interring a vampire competitor, spews out that tired old "you know the definition of insanity?" quote, which quickly outs scriptwriters Tyler Tyce and Shay Hatten as either hacks or half-assing it. That's the sort of inane bullshit someone who's trying to sound smart would crowbar into a speech without saying anything intelligent*. And since this scene is working up a sweat to establish Karla as a credible threat... well, that's a pretty good indication of how bad the script for this is going to be.

 Oh, and it turns out that the vampire Bud Jablonski (Jamie Foxx's character) killed at the beginning was important to her. It's as good a plot kickoff as any other B-movie device.

 It turns out Jablonski uses pool cleaning as a cover for his real vampire hunting job - even after he's been kicked out of the vampire hunting union, he's able to scrape by selling fangs to the black market for a profit (why there's a black market for fangs, it's never explained.)  But in the sort of hacky contrivance that makes shit scripts like this tick, his ex-wife will be taking his child to Florida in a week unless he raises $5000. And to get the money, he needs better bounties.

 So off goes Jablonski to rejoin the Vampire Hunting union, from which he was fired for being a loose canon who played by his own rules etc. etc. He gets his old vampire hunter friend Snoop Dog (in cowboy getup and obviously having fun with the role) to pull some strings and get him back in.

 And it works... mostly. He's grudgingly admitted back into the Union, on probation, and he needs to take an overseer with him to make sure he doesn't break any regulations.

 And now it's a buddy action comedy. But, wait for it- his nanny is a straight-laced desk jockey (the normally dependable Dave Franco) who's never been in the field! He's got Photograph set as a ringtone, and his thing is to piss himself whenever he's in trouble! Hilarious, right?

 And so the stage is set for a series of vamp fights, with Karla as the boss at the end. Will the scriptwriters avoid the obvious cliché of  having her kidnap Jablonski's family and use them to get at our protagonist? Of course not, don't be stupid. Snoop Dog and a couple of vampire allies join the fray too for the final confrontation, including poor Natasha Liu Bordizzo, who gets a cool katana scene but also the worst and most underwritten and poorly set-up role in this whole sorry mess.

 The script for this movie is trash, and not good trash. At all. It's simultaneously overstuffed and half baked idiocy where the mythology is shit, no one acts like a human being, there's no interesting mystery (or... interesting anything) and none of the jokes land. People spout exposition at each other with information they both already know in the most inelegant way possible, and every. Single. Plot. Element is crap. There's nothing salvageable here, every element that's introduced is a shitshow.

 Wait, not every element! at one point Jablonski teams up with a douchy duo of fellow hunters (The Nazarian brothers, one of which is played by Scott Adkins), and they are actually funny! This was honestly a pretty big surprise, given the botched execution of every other single joke attempted in this film.

 But none of this can be laid at the director's feet - or indeed, any of the actors, other than the fact that they chose to run with the material. They do what they can with what they're given.

 The movie's considerable saving grace is that it's got a lot of great action sequences - not quite enough to fully redeem the script, because the pacing is off and it grinds to a screeching halt too often and for too long for some extremely unfunny business, but on the whole it makes it absolutely worthwhile. Doing justice to both genres in action comedies is hard (just ask Bullet Train, or so many Chinese martial arts movies); action this good deserves to be taken out of context and celebrated.

 The fights are fun, varied and inventive, and the one good thing I can say about the script is that it eventually facilitates them. As you'd expect from a stuntman director, there are a lot of acrobatics, tricky falls, and excellently choreographed mayhem.

Snoop Dog gets a Gatling gun, and gets to use it.

 I hope this does well and the talent involved gets chances to do more stuff - I'm eager to see what Mr. Perry does next. Lets hope he gets to do a decent script next time.

*You know who does the same thing expecting different results all the time? Scientists. Me, when rolling some dice. Stop using that glib piece of shit quote, and stop attributing it to Einstein.