Photo by Summit Entertainment
From "Next Day Air."
Influenced by British gangster specialist Guy Ritchie as well as Quentin Tarantino, "Next Day Air" is yet another motor-mouthed post-"Pulp Fiction" crime comedy, with the novelty of an African-American and Hispanic cast and an African-American director (music video veteran Benny Boom, making his feature debut).
Photo by Summit Entertainment
Donald Faison is a pot-loving deliveryman in the crime comedy "Next Day Air."
Smalltime hoods Brody and Guch have seen better days. But when a wacked-out courier accidentally brings them a box containing 10 kilos of high-quality cocaine ...
Rating: R for pervasive language, drug content, some violence and brief sexuality
Length: 84 minutes
Released: May 8, 2009 Nationwide
Cast: Mos Def, Donald Faison, Mike Epps, Wood Harris, Emilio Rivera
Director: Benny Boom
Writer: Blair Cobbs
Coarse in dialogue and action (a tongue is severed, for laughs) and extremely ugly to look at (the digital photography is so dim it's headache-inducing), this low-budget, drive-in reject gets by solely on the appeal of its ensemble cast, which often seems to be improvising. Donald Faison and Mos Def are stoner deliverymen; Mike Epps and Wood Harris are bumbling bank robbers; Darius McCrary sheds his sitcom "Family Matters" image to play a taciturn thug.
The action revolves around a cache of top-grade cocaine delivered by mistake to three stooge-like perpetrators in an inner-city Philadelphia apartment. When a Mexican drug lord (Emilio Rivera) shows up with his pachyderm-sized bodyguard to reclaim the powder, he makes this introduction: "My name is Bodega Diablo, and this is my associate, Rhino. I call him 'the Grim Reaper.'" A guy named Rhino needs a nickname?
Forty years from now, give or take a decade, "Next Day Air" may be fascinating for its relentless early 21st-century "urban" slang and attitude. Let's hope it also seems antique for the idea that guns are as accessible as Kleenex and as amusing, when used as comic props, as a rubber chicken.
-- John Beifuss: 529-2394
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