Weekend Watch: Never Have I Ever Season 3, Day Shift, Fall
Devi lands her crush, Jamie Fox clashes with the undead and two young women try to stay alive.
Image Credit: Netflix
Welcome to the latest edition of Weekend Watch, in which I recommend (or occasionally warn against) movies or TV shows I’ve been checking out. This week, Devi Vishwakumar tangles with more teenage issues, Jamie Foxx vanquishes vampires and two climbers grapple with gravity. Follow James on Twitter: @jamwhite
Never Have I Ever is a show that I’ve written about before, as I’m a big fan. I included it in a roundup of cheerful shows to lift your mood during the dark days of summer 2020 and welcomed its return for Season 2 last year.
It’s good to report that it remains strong for Season 3. This new run of episodes kicks off with Devi (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan on charming form as ever) deep into dating crush object Paxton Hall-Yoshida (Darren Barnet). The course of true love – at least in Devi’s eyes – doesn’t run smoothly, but the show deals with that in a typically refreshing fashion.
While Devi is moving further away from the grief over her father’s death that devastated her life, he still has an impact on her, leading to memorably emotional scenes and powerful flashbacks. The show is mostly concerned with Devi’s dealing with the ups and downs of teen life, be it navigating affairs of the heart, her own emotional control and testing boundaries as she grows up. There are also future educational options to consider.
Everything’s wrapped up in the show’s trademark humour and honest performances, and it’s still able to generate good feelings while also staying true to its characters.
As usual, the highlights of the series happen whenever Devi hangs out with her best friends (including Eleanor, played by Ramona Young, and Lee Rodriguez’s Fabiola) or her family (her mother Nalini, played by Poorna Jagannathan, has a winning way with parental put-downs and is aided admirably this year by her own mother, Nirmala, played by Ranjita Chakravarty).
Not forgetting, of course, a pitch-perfect voice-over from John McEnroe, who continues to narrate Devi’s life (and handing over to someone else for one episode; I won’t spoil who, but long-time viewers will know).
The series will be wrapping up next year with its fourth season, and I’ll be sorry to see it go. But I’m glad we got the episodes that we did.
Image Credit: Netflix
While Never Have I Ever is a returning Netflix favourite, Day Shift is more one of those movies that hit the streaming service with barely a trailer to announce it. And it continues the company’s obsession with the fang club after the likes of First Kill and Night Teeth.
As with the latter, Day Shift focuses on a basic vamp concept to power its story – the fanged ones have lived among humans for hundreds of years and were once worshipped as gods. Yet in time humanity turned against the genetic aberrations and now they’re hunted by a unionized set of vampire killers.
There’s a powerful member of the toothy society called Audrey (Karla Souza) who has her eyes on California’s San Fernando Valley (the sweltering bit just north of Los Angeles). But she doesn’t count on one vampire hunter, Bud Jablonski (Jamie Foxx) who is just trying to earn enough money to ensure his estranged wife and daughter don’t move away to Florida.
That’s your essential plot dynamic and all the movie really cares to do by way of narrative. The rest mostly coasts on star power and charisma, pairing Foxx’s Bud with nebbishy, rule-loving union rep Seth (Dave Franco, offering solid nervy energy that plays well off Foxx’s relaxed machismo). There’s also Snoop Dogg, having fun as legendary slayer Big John Elliott, who wields some impressive weaponry.
JJ Perry, who has come up through the stunt ranks and graduates from second unit work to directing, has worked a lot with John Wick’s Chad Stahelski (who produces here via his 87Eleven company). So the stunts are naturally a highlight, even in the fight scenes do fall back on grapples and spins, plus the old standby of someone being thrown/shot/kicked across a room.
The rest is basic; once the set-up is in place, it follows such a straight track to its conclusion that you could write what you expect to happen on a piece of paper as the title appears on screen, seal it in an envelope and expect to be proved right by the time the end credits are rolling. It’s goofy and funny and plays well with the concept.
Day Shift is mildly diverting vamp-slaying fun that sometimes strains against its relatively thrifty budget (some effects work, others would have been rejected by the Buffy team way back in the late 1990s). You might wonder why Foxx would agree to something like this, but perhaps he just wanted to have a good time kicking butt? Either way, it won’t change the world, but it’ll pass the time.
Day Shift is on Netflix now.
Image Credit: Lionsgate
Fall wants you to fear heights. If you’re not already burdened with vertigo or acrophobia, it’s a movie that will almost certainly fuel some in you.
This is a pared-down thriller that strands two young climbers – Grace Fulton’s Becky and Virginia Gardner’s Hunter – at the top of a remote, abandoned, 2,000-foot-high transmission tower. They’re risk-takers who love to scale different heights, but Becky is still in mourning after the death of her husband Dan (Mason Gooding) a year ago in a climbing accident.
Getting up the tower is a scary, but relatively straightforward affair. Getting down… Well, that’s a whole other matter.
Co-writer/director Scott Mann (who scripts with Jonathan Frank) ratchets up the tension and brings out every trick in the book – while inventing a few new ones – to make you feel every moment of terror as the two women are stranded.
Using a combination of practical shooting on real platforms built out of mountains and in the desert, it’s a nervy little thriller that does its best work in the middle of the story when the main characters are initially trapped. There are the usual stages of terror and trying to figure out how to either get down or alert someone else to their precarious position.
Fulton and Gardner really commit to their roles – you buy that they’re friends, but with a more checkered history than is initially suspected. The drama doesn’t completely convince you all the way to the end, but there’s enough to hold your interest. And, if you like Jeffrey Dean Morgan tapping into his emotional side (and not being snarky while wielding a baseball bat), there is a tiny moment with him.
It’s worth putting your fears aside and checking out Fall, provided you’re okay with the mild frustration when it doesn’t quite stick the, er, landing.
Fall is in US cinemas now and will land in the UK on 2 September.