[With a solid premise about working-class vampire hunters, Day
Shift had real potential — but there’s no escaping the Netflix
curse.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

JAMIE FOXX’S DAY SHIFT IS ANOTHER BIG-BUDGET NETFLIX MEDIOCRITY  
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Eileen Jones
August 27, 2022
Jacobin
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_ With a solid premise about working-class vampire hunters, Day Shift
had real potential — but there’s no escaping the Netflix curse. _

Jamie Foxx plays vampire hunter Bud Jablonski in the new action movie
Day Shift., (Netflix)

 

oo bad about _Day Shift._ It’s got a good premise. But after a few
promising early scenes, it turns rote, macho, and tiresome.

And for a Netflix movie that cost $100 million, it sure looks bad in
certain sequences. The underground cave section toward the end is
pitiful. Maybe throw the production design team a few bucks, would ya?

_Day Shift _is about a struggling pool cleaner named Bud Jablonski
(Jamie Foxx) driving his rusted out, loaded-down pickup truck from job
to job around the sunbaked San Fernando Valley. But he’s only using
that job as a cover — he’s really a working-class vampire hunter,
cleaning houses of invading bloodsuckers. He works with his own
customized tools, such as a silver-coated wire that can be stretched
across a doorway at neck height, which, according to Bud, “never
fails” to behead the unwary vampire on the attack. But though the
work is onerous, he’s barely getting by. To support himself, he
cashes in vampire fangs at a local pawnshop run by Troy, played by the
terrific Peter Stormare.

It seems that Bud has been drummed out of the vampire hunters’ union
for multiple infractions of the “he just won’t go by the book”
variety so popular in action films. And his rate of pay suffers
accordingly.

 

When his ex-wife Jocelyn (Meagan Good) demands that Bud come up with
enough money for private school plus some long-overdue braces for
their ten-year-old daughter Heather (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), Bud
realizes the only way to get it is to go on a vampire-hunting spree at
union rates. So he goes to plead for readmittance, bringing his
friend, a highly respected union member named Big John Elliott (Snoop
Dogg). The union operates in secret in a corporate office underneath a
laundromat. The sneery union boss, Ralph Seeger (Eric Lange),
grudgingly reinstates Bud. But he assigns Bud a supervising partner, a
bespectacled desk jockey named Seth (Dave Franco). He’s totally
untested in the field, but will make a good spy dinging Bud for
further infractions against union rules, which will allow Seeger to
throw Bud out of the union for good.

To say the least, the union is presented in unflattering terms. Sure,
the money is better, but the bureaucracy! All those nitpicky rules and
regulations, not to mention the heavy-handed and corrupt bosses!

If that seems like the kind of pop-culture critique of unions you’d
have seen back in the 1940s through the early 1970s, when unions were
comparatively strong, well — yeah. It’s disheartening to see a
replay of this kind of petty griping in an era when the labor movement
has long since been crushed, and we’ve seen how bitterly that has
cost the working class.

There’s not much more to the film from that point on. With Seth in
tow, Bud goes about cleaning houses of vampire “hives,” and pretty
soon a buddy movie develops as the two men, who hate each other
initially, gradually become friends. Actually, Seth becomes converted
to the fearless macho ways of Budd and Big John, and becomes a vampire
hunter himself. He stops (literally) peeing his own pants in terror,
and even faces down Ralph, the mean union boss.

“Do you know how to spell ‘Traitor’?” asks Ralph.

“Sure, T-R-A-I-T-O-R,” says the now-cool Seth.

The ultimate villain isn’t the union boss, though, it’s Audrey San
Fernando (Karla Souza), the Latina vampire real estate mogul who wears
tight, brightly colored suits and has big plans to take over the
valley and plant vampire hives everywhere. She’s got a sympathetic
backstory — Bud killed her vampire daughter, whom she’d recovered
and “turned” only when the girl was already old, so she looked
like her mother’s own grandmother. But Audrey is painted as such a
stereotypically evil girl-boss villain, this sympathy bid has no
effect.

In interviews with the film’s producer Chad Stahelski (_John Wick_)
about shepherding the film’s director, J. J. Perry, through a
stuntman-to-director career arc that resembles his own,
Stahelski bros it up
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time, striking a similar note to the one adopted in the latter half of
the movie:

I got to talk to J. J. and like, ‘Look man, I got to be your guide
up the mountain. You got to climb the mountain, but I can help tell
you where not to step.’ . . . And as far as the producer goes,
‘Look, I got him, I get it. Give him the rope,’ or ‘Hey, this is
where we need to force him into the box. He’ll be twice as creative.
Trust me. This guy is going to pull it out.’ . . . At the end of the
day, Steve, it’s about people. . . . It’s, y’know?

Oh, we know. Climb the mountain, into the box, pull it out. Righteous,
man.

It’s a shame the movie didn’t stick with its early, darkly comical
tone, featuring the gritty life of a harassed blue-collar vampire
hunter just trying to get by. Because that seemed promising, and Jamie
Foxx was charming as the single dad with the gruesome and demanding
job, shining everyone on from bosses to ex-wives to pawnshop guys,
hoping to survive another day.

As the film winds up with a series of more conventional action scenes,
it seems as if, instead of sticking with comedic action — which is
always an option (see the entire career of Jackie Chan) — some
combination of director and producers decided to go for a wearisome
representation of the man so confident and incredible at what he does
that he awes everyone.

_Day Shift_ is yet another Netflix bid to create a big-budget,
talent-packed action film franchise. But just like _The Gray Man
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it descends into mediocrity_._ The franchise goal is clearly
indicated by developments at the end of the film, which doesn’t let
certain compelling characters die lest sequels are a possibility. But
so far, it’s a dubious trend that’s not panning out well.

Stop it, Netflix. You’re drunk. Go home.

CONTRIBUTORS

Eileen Jones is a film critic at _Jacobin_ and author of _Filmsuck,
USA_. She also hosts a podcast called Filmsuck
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