The plot of “Next Day Air” revolves around a drug shipment that gets delivered to the wrong apartment, but the movie itself is an object lesson in not trusting packaging — while the ads and trailers for the film would lead you to believe that it’s a comedy starring Donald Faison and Mos Def, neither of those charming comic leads appear for very long in the film.
And as for “Next Day Air” being a comedy, that’s debatable, at best.
Faison opens the film as Leo, a deliveryman who gets chewed out for constantly being high on the job by his boss (Debbie Allen, who hilariously finds new syllables in the word “weed”). We see that his superior has a point when he mistakenly delivers the package of cocaine to apartment 302 and not 303.
The inhabitants of 302 include the spectacularly inept criminals Guch (Wood Harris) and Brody (Mike Epps), who look at the mistaken delivery as manna from heaven. Brody immediately contacts his cousin Shavoo (Omari Hardwick), a drug dealer who’s starting to make overtures about leaving the business behind.
Meanwhile, sadistic drug lord Bodega (Emilio Rivera) flies to Philadelphia to figure out what happened to his shipment, which lackey Jesus (Cisco Reyes) and his girlfriend Chita (Yasmin Deliz) want desperately to find so as to avoid the homicidal wrath of the big boss.
Most of the movie follows the parallel stories of the people who got the drugs and the people looking for the drugs, with occasional appearances by Faison and maybe two scenes with Mos Def as fellow delivery driver Eric.
This bait-and-switch might not have been so annoying had the supporting cast of “Next Day Air” been given anything funny or even interesting to do, but we’re stuck having to care about whether Guch and Brody will get rich, Shavoo will retire from crime and Jesus and Chita will survive the visit from Bodega. And any shreds of comedy are literally blown away in a violent climax that sees most of the cast shooting at each other, complete with graphic blood spurts. It’s as though director Benny Boom and screenwriter Blair Cobbs couldn’t come up with enough to make a comedy, a drama or an action movie, so they just threw everything they had into the stew and hoped a movie would result.
Apart from the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them appearances by Faison, Allen and Mos Def, the only laughs that “Next Day Air” has to offer come from first-time actress and one-time TV presenter Deliz, whose Chita takes no guff from Jesus or any of the easily-flabbergasted Next Day Air drivers. If only she could have stood up to the director this forcefully, this might have wound up being a movie worth seeing.
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