Next Day Air

What would happen if the gangsters from a Quentin Tarantino or a Guy Ritchie movie wandered into a stoner comedy? The result would most likely be an ungainly mess. Such is the case with Next Day Air - a caper comedy that supplies a few laughs, but piles on the nastiness and violence to such a large degree that I started to become confused as to how I was supposed to react to it.

The action kicks off when a pot-addicted delivery man named Leo (Donald Faison from TV's Scrubs) drops a package off at the wrong address. The package contains 10 bundles of cocaine, and the apartment just happens to belong to a pair of incompetent thugs named Brody and Guch (Mike Epps and Wood Harris), who are still recovering from their last botched robbery, where they managed to make off with the bank's security tapes but no money. The two guys see the cocaine as their ticket to better things, and plan to sell it to Brody's cousin (Omari Hardwick), who is a drug dealer. What they don't know is that the package was supposed to go to their next-door neighbor, Jesus (Cisco Reyes), who finds his life on the line when the package doesn't arrive on time. With the help of his girlfriend Chita (Yasmin Deliz, in a lively performance), he is determined to track down the delivery man and find out what happened to the package.

Next Day Air shows a surprising amount of humor in its opening half hour, allowing the audience to let down its guard. The funniest moment comes when Brody calls his cousin to tell him about the cocaine. The entire dialogue is made up of slang and inside lingo, making it nearly incomprehensible for the audience to understand, so the movie provides some helpful subtitles at the bottom of the screen. It reminded me of the scene in Airplane where Barbara Billingsley spoke "jive", and hinted at some inspired lunacy. Despite a few chuckles early on, the movie never quite lives up to this moment. I didn't mind this so much. It was when the movie became an all-out bloodbath where things started to sour for me.

First-time filmmaker, Benny Boom (I'm praying this is his real name, and not a screen name), gets a lot of energy from his cast, and certainly knows how to stage an action sequence. He uses rapid cuts, but doesn't overdo them to the point of annoyance. The problem lies at the screenplay level, which is largely inconsistent. It seems to be pulling the film in various directions, never sure if it wants to be light-hearted, or if it wants us to take these characters seriously. What are we supposed to think when these comic goofballs start killing each other in graphic shootouts that would be right at home in a gritty crime drama? It's a question I kept on asking, but the movie was never able to provide an answer. The fact that the film's climactic bloody confrontation ends with a laugh (it comes during the end credits) left me feeling even more confused.

Next Day Air obviously wants to be a pitch black comedy, but never gets the tone right. It feels conflicted, and that feeling carries through to the audience. There were parts of it I admired, but I wasn't sure what I was supposed to feel on the whole. This is a movie that needed a few more drafts to figure things out.

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