Night Shift: Movie Review

Random unfunny chaos of idiot brothers being idiots.

Night Shift takes a long time for the narrative to start taking a logical form, and by that point the random chaos has just driven the movie boring and pointless. I think (I’m guessing here because the weird cuts to random scenes to open the movie doesn’t help anything) the point is that these brothers are feeling lost, do not know how to deal with death, and are finally at the do something or lose everything stage.		2021 Directed by: Joey Menzel Screenplay by: Joey Menzel Starring: Jesse Morton, Anthony Winnick
As I said, I think that’s what the movie is supposed to be about, but that theme is buried among scene after scene, random edit after random edit of the two brothers acting like idiotic douche bags. They’re stupid, they do stupid things, and the movie (especially early on) decides to put the stupid things they do out of chronological order. Just to make an already stupid movie confusing. I have to assume the Australian cut of this movie makes a lot more sense and has a much better flow than whatever version Prime Video Canada put out. Listed as a dark comedy, the brothers decide to hold up a convenience store clerk for money and then take them hostage instead. I’m all for dark comedies, but it’s much easier to have empathy for the lead characters if they seem like good people driven to extreme actions or people who have had an unfair shake in life. Des (Jesse Morton) and Bobby (Anthony Winnick) don’t fit into either above category. They’re just idiots and have always chosen to live life carelessly. I get the sense that their mother dying didn’t make them any smarter or any stupider, they have always been idiots. Their bad choices don’t get a free pass, and that also doesn’t make it funny. The lead pair are acceptable actors. Fine line delivery and I highly doubt they are anything like this in real life. However, the supporting actors are much weaker. Most of them seem like they’re reading their lines from a cue card behind the camera with zero connection to their current situation. That would really drag the comedy down, if it was funny in the first place. Night Shift seems like one idea (they have to get cash, let’s rob a convenience store) and to stretch it out just threw in random scenes. And I really do mean “throw in”, the editing is all over the place and there is zero structure for the first third of the movie. All the random scenes have no apparent connection other than, “See? These boys are idiots”. Yeah, I got that.