Day Shift (2022)

Day Shift is a Netflix vampire action comedy in which Jamie Foxx plays a father whose pool-cleaning business conceals a fang-pulling trade, and whose week is spent scrambling for tuition and orthodontia money. The economics are real enough: fangs fetch a poor price at the pawn shop, the hunters operate through a union with dues, protocols, and a boss who despises paperwork. None of this becomes a critique. The film waves at blue-collar precarity the way a man waves at a neighbor he does not intend to speak to.

The ensemble is multiracial and thoroughly unbothered about it, the least dramatic possible outcome and probably the healthiest. Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Meagan Good, and Karla Souza occupy the roles of ally, ex-wife, and villain, and none of them arrive carrying a thesis. Race is never raised. There is no LGBTQ presence, no climate anxiety, no meditation on body image, and no neurodivergent character to speak of. The vampire mythology is invented whole, owing nothing to any historical record that would require revising. The picture's boldest social gesture is hiring a diverse cast and then declining to mention it.

The remainder is a buddy comedy with Scott Adkins doing martial arts and Snoop Dogg doing Snoop Dogg. The script's closest approach to a sermon is a running gag about union loopholes, delivered with the gravity of a man reading a phone book. It is loud, it is silly, and it declines to instruct anyone on how to live. In an era that often treats the action comedy as a delivery mechanism for moral instruction, this one simply delivers fists and fangs. That restraint is not virtue. It is a relief.