NIGHT SHIFT (1982)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
"Night Shift" has great comic ideas but it never fully realizes them. It is the kind of comedy that believes its ideas are good enough for laughs by definition, yet it never proves why.
Henry Winkler is Chuck Lumley, a quiet morgue attendant who reluctantly works a night shift. He needs his peace and quiet until he gets a new partner named Bill (Michael Keaton, in his debut performance). Bill is the kind of incessant pain-in-the-neck who's always talking about harebrained ideas, like feeding tuna to fish! To make matters worse, Bill uses their hearse for his limousine service. Chuck's home life is no big improvement, including living with a fiancee who thinks she is too fat and suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder (in the days before such a term was coined). Finally, there is Belinda (Shelley Long), a hooker with a heart of gold, who no longer has a pimp since he's been murdered. So Chuck and Bill decide to be her pimp, as well as service a bunch of other hookers with a benefits package! The pimping business and the limousine service are run at the morgue, including indulging in wild parties.
"Night Shift" sports a certain ingenuity in its setting and wild comic premise. The end result, however, doesn't elicit much in the way of a comedy or a black comedy. The fault lies with the screenplay, which hardly milks any laughs out of its plot or characters. Director Ron Howard often shows sincerity in a plot that doesn't require it. And a subplot about a pair of pimp killers (one of them is played by stand-up comic and "Law and Order" star Richard Belzer) who want a piece of the action seems to come from another movie altogether.
Henry Winkler is no real help either, showing indifference to the situations around him. Except for a hysterically funny scene involving Keaton with a tape recorder, there are no big laughs to be had. Michael Keaton reaches high but never fully delivers - being terminally annoying is not funny. Same with the miscasting of Shelley Long as the TOO NICE hooker - so nice that she is hardly credible as a New York streetwalker. Meg Ryan would have been a better choice.
The movie picks up some pace towards the end when Chuck suddenly goes ballistic as everything around him crumbles. It is the smartest move in a movie that is fatally inert at its core with indifference being the key word. My advice: sleep it off during the graveyard shift.
