Next Day Air - One of the Worst Movies of the Year

Next Day Air is like walking behind a fat chick in a thong. It's unpleasant, disgusting, offensive, and you can't wait until it's out of your sight. Such a miserable production should be relegated to the direct to DVD market, but unfortunately, it has somehow managed to invade theaters, much to the disdain of movie goers everywhere. Watching this film is like taking a can of mace and spraying it into your face, only it's not as pleasant.

Leo (Donald Faison of "Scrubs" fame) is a delivery boy for Next Day Air, a shipping company responsible for getting packages to their destinations. One day, while high from marijuana, he accidentally drops a package off at the wrong address, to Brody (Mike Epps) and Guch (Wood Harris). They soon discover that the package contains 10 kilos of cocaine. Poor and down on their luck, they decide to sell it, but little do they know, the owners of the product are on their way to pay them a visit.

That's the story and it goes nowhere. By the time the credits roll around, you'll likely be staring at the screen wondering, what was the point? Next Day Air is abysmally bad, a painfully unfunny exercise in poor filmmaking with no redeeming qualities throughout its painfully long runtime (about an hour and 20 minutes).

This movie isn't just stupid. It's brain deadening. It's a movie that tries to find humor in violence and drug smuggling, but the problem is that neither of those are funny. One scene shows two men dousing another in gasoline and threatening to light him on fire while the drenched man panics for his life. Har har.

Still, at this point in the movie, it isn't truly violent. It's merely using the possibility of violence for jokes, none of which are amusing. But then the climax of the film erupts into a shootout over the cocaine, resulting in a multitude of dead bodies strewn across the floor, with one encounter ending in a knife to the throat. Two people are left standing, one taking the coke and the other taking the money. This abrupt explosion of unnecessary violence doesn't present any resolution to the film, and instead leaves you bitter and depressed by the ruthless bloodletting.

Next Day Air also plays up some offensive stereotypes of African Americans and Latinos, including one Latino female who, when angry, spouts Spanish words in between English, making an incoherent mess of a dialogue littered with the uses of "ese" and "muchacho." No character escapes stereotype, so it functioned more as an entertaining game of "Spot the Misrepresentation and Lack of Respect for Human Individuality" than a movie in and of itself.

Next Day Air is idiotic, without one redeeming quality, sans Mos Def, who in his very brief scenes exuberates the most charm, but even his talents can't save this unavoidable mess. With awful dialogue, a stupid and uninteresting story, bland direction, poor performances, and offensive stereotypes, Next Day Air is hands down one of the worst films of the year and come December, you can expect to see it on that list.

Next Day Air receives 0/5