Strays

 Strays is the sort of film that's kind of immune to criticism - a gleefully dumb, very R-rated comedy about four talking dogs on a quest to bite someone's dick off. Unless they completely fuck up the jokes, you pretty much know if you're going to like it going in, don't you?
 So... they mostly  don't fuck up the jokes. There's some funny stuff, some weirdness, and a lot of cute dogs. And There's a bunch of good gags that weren't on the trailer. There you go, make of that what you will

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 Will Ferrell plays Reggie, a very cute, terminally optimistic Border Terrier with a dipshit owner (Will Forte) who hates his guts. Reggie is blind to just how badly he's being mistreated until his owner abandons him in the middle of the city.

 There he's taken in by Bug (Jamie Foxx), a no-bullshit Boston Terrier that introduces him to the stray lifestyle and his two friends Maggie (Isla Fisher with her native accent because she's playing an Australian Sheperd) and Hunter (Randall Park), an overtly genial cone-wearing Great Dane.

 Horrified when Reggie tells them about the 'good times' he's had with his owner, the other dogs help Reggie realize that he's in a toxic relationship. Pissed off, he vows to go back home and bite his owner's dick off. The others, partly because they're drunk (from drinking bin juice outside a pub) encourage him and decide to tag along.

 The problem: Reggie's house is out in the boondocks, and all he's got is a few landmarks to go by. But he's nothing if not optimistic, so off they all go. The trip includes a psychedelic freakout, a run-in with police dogs on the hunt for a missing girl, and a bunch of other misadventures. Also: lots of jokes about humping, shitting, pissing, and Hunter's enormous dick; it's as profane as they could make it, which is fine because decent amount of jokes land.
 There's also a lot of simple, observational dog humor. This ranges from them talking about sex positions (there's only one: normal style), staging a fireworks scene as if it was the end of the world, chats about how much they hate mailmen, and some funny business about spinning around before going to sleep. It's been done a thousand times before (particularly that hoary mailman thing - that dates at least from the fifties), but the voice cast is very game, the writing is decent and the dogs are lovely.

 Writer Dan Perrault (with, I'm guessing, an ad-libbing assist from the crew? There are some very Ferrell lines in this, though he didn't get a credit) does allow the script to go off on some bizarre, funny tangents - my favorite has got to be a Labrador Retriever (Josh Gad) who constantly narrates the events of his owner's life in a folksy drawl while gentle music plays in the background. These people know their dog movies. Unfortunately most of the script isn't as inspired as that, but there are a few other good, goofy non-sequiturs in that vein there.

 Not everything works. The film takes real canine footage and digitally adds in the lip sync, which is a problem when the dialog is shot like human dialog - you've got a mostly still dog whose lips are moving in an unnatural way; it doesn't look great. The film seems to recognize this and tries to make its scenes more dynamic (and the dogs, and their trainers, do a great job of it) but not nearly enough. The directing (by Josh Greenbaum) is, as in most comedies these days, unobtrusive and fairly personality-free.

 Not all of the jokes work, but that's to be expected. Also to be expected, but always disappointing, is that there are some rote life lessons that aren't quite subverted - your typical case of modern comedies wanting to have their cake and eat it. But that's ok. The film remains likeable, its heart is in the right place, and just look at all those very good boys and girls!

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.