Back before I struck it rich telling people what to think about popular entertainment, I worked for a chain of packing and shipping stores.
The temptation to steal in a job like that is basically overwhelming. It's especially bad when you work in a college town with a big agricultural department. Instant the customer's back is turned, bam, you've got your hands on more frozen bull semen than you know how to handle. We shipped everything under the sun. I could be sitting on a dozen 80-pound bars of stolen silver right now if only I weren't too weak to lift my own eyelids. Have to prop them open with little toothpick things.
There isn't much wonder to be found in any job that can make you hate Christmas, but packages, like movies, could still surprise you after you'd seen a thousand. Next Day Air may have brought me back to my shipping days, but some "Man, I'm glad I don't do that anymore" nostalgia is about all it provoked out of me.
Despite their incompetence — they recently robbed a bank without taking any actual money — Mike Epps and Wood Harris are able to scrape by as armed thugs. Their luck takes a sudden upswing when stoned delivery man Donald Faison misdelivers a package of 10 bricks of cocaine to their apartment.
Epps and Harris immediately arrange to broker it to Epps' dealer cousin, but any chunk of drugs that big is bound to draw heat. Within hours, both its sender and its intended recipient are locked on the trail.
I could watch things getting stolen for days. This is probably because unless you have a thing for gin-stained carpets and Lord of the Rings fanfic scripts, the only thing I own worth stealing is the neighbor's laptop I break in to compose these on every weekend. Heist movies, then, are normally right up my alley.
Part of the big appeal is they almost always feature funny screwoffs who end up in way over their heads and then die horribly, which I think is pretty much a perfect metaphor for life. Next Day Air sets itself up to succeed in this department with a winning cast of small- and no-name actors who improve every role they're in, but writer Blair Cobbs' script is too thin to give them what they need to work with.
It has its moments. Loose and sporadically funny, the movie's charming enough, especially when it spends time with Faison and his degenerate coworker Mos Def. What this suggests to me is that crime stories are done, but the package delivery industry is a rich vein of untapped box office gold. My big idea: a shipping company constantly pranks customers by wrapping their dishes in one layer of bubble wrap instead of two. Burn.
Less awesome is the gangster side. It's an odd thing to feel as though Epps and Harris are simultaneously believable characters and also overfamiliar yet underdeveloped types, but that's how it hit me, so deal with it.
Maybe it's the lack of investment in these poor saps that explains why the crime story never seems to fully understand where it's going, right up through an ending that's as much arbitrary as satisfying. Next Day Air is that odd movie where you keep finding yourself wishing you liked it more than what you're watching on the screen.
Grade: C+