Day Shift & Pingu

Bad Dads Film Review

Dan had at least three different attempts to define a Top 5 this week proving just how desperately in need of rebooting this part of the show is, finally settling on the Top 5 Bands for us to discuss.
DAY SHIFT is Netflix's latest exclusive and is produced by the 87Eleven team, creators of the JOHN WICK franchise and the recently reviewed on this very podcast NOBODY. Stunt coordinator JJ Perry makes his debut with this action comedy in which pool cleaning vampire hunter Bud Jablonski (Jamie Foxx) has a little over 48 hours to make $10,000 in order to pay for his daughter's braces and tuition fees or his ex-wife will go to live with her mother in Florida. At the request of cowboy legend Big John (Snoop Dogg) Bud is given one last chance by The Union, a secret underground group of bounty hunters the scale and reach of which seems to change between scenes, and is joined in the unexplainedly lucrative vampire teeth hunting game by officious jobsworth Seth (Dave Franco) as comic relief and just how much hilarity ensues depends on how funny you think it is that he pisses himself in fear and makes for a slightly rubbish vampire when he gets turned in the final act (SPOILER ALERT). Meanwhile real estate agent Audrey San Fernando has Bud in her sights whilst she plans to establish a new paradise for her kind right in the LA valley.
Plot out of the way let's talk about the action which is really what this is all in service of and is frequently beautifully shot, with a mixture of long takes and still cameras in which we can admire the physicality of the stunt team, and insane video game inspired camera moves. A midpoint action scene involving Scott Adkins and Steve Howey as The Nazarian brothers is a standout and involves vampires bursting through the walls and ceiling of a house, often caught by shotgun blasts and being sent back through the air in a completely different direction, Adkins using wooden stakes as num-chuks, a man decapitated using a television and a woman fighting using only her legs with kitchen knives in between her toes. Later a thrilling sequence in which Bud and his daughter Paige are pursued after leaving a birthday party begins and is full of inventive use of drone footage and video game references.
Given all of the cool people involved, the fact that its well-crafted, well shot action genre fare with a blue collar protagonist and a story about creating power through gentrification, I feel I should love this more than I did but there's something which feels so forced about the world building in DAY SHIFT that it somehow feels like less than the sum of its parts. There is little to get behind in terms of characters, the final temple looks like it was built on the set of a children's tv gameshow, the actor who plays Audrey has no screen presence at all and the dialogue is frequently abysmal. Like the MEN IN BLACK reboot or the absolutely awful R.I.P.D with more beheadings. Don’t get me wrong I would watch the sequel and its precisely the sort of ridiculous high concept mashup thing – John Wick with vampires – that I want Netflix to lean into but given the talent involved I hoped for more than just great stunts and tolerable entertainment.
Swiss German emperor penguin PINGU hides a letter in this week’s kids tv offering in an episode titled, appropriately enough, "Pingu Hides a Letter". It has an adorable look using replacement (as opposed to stop) animation, a distinctive invented Penguinese language which co

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