12 Hour Shift

The dark comedies I like the most are the ones full of sick, twisted, amoral people being put through the ringer. War Of The Roses, Very Bad Things, stuff like that. Don't get me wrong, a dark comedy with a hero in it is fine -- Heathers and Death To Smoochy, for instance, are both excellent -- but I think the style of humor works best when you're laughing at the misfortune of someone who rather deserves it. 12 Hour Shift is one of those movies, and were it not for some production issues and being perhaps a little too ambitious for its own good, it would be higher. Angela Bettis is a nurse in a small hospital in Arkansas. She's a drug addict and has a deal with the head nurse to sell organs of the recently deceased (usually people she helps usher into death) on the black market. Things go bad on this shift when her idiot cousin acts as a runner and the organs go up missing, leading to a seriously ridiculous (in a fun way) set of dominos falling, one after the other, to make this the worst 12 hour shift ever. I love the performances in this movie. There isn't a single person in here who isn't interesting. The movie is anchored around Bettis, and her acerbic, I'm-done-with-this-shit attitude is a joy to watch, largely because a lot of the problems she ends up facing are things she brought on herself. The rest of the cast more than holds up their end, especially Chloe Farnworth as the dizty -- and later psycho -- cousin, Nikea Gamby-Turner as head nurse Karen, and Kit Williamson as the police officer. But every side character and even walk-ons have a part to play. And that leads me to the way this movie assembles itself. You'll think it's moving too slow, that it's got a bunch of extraneous side characters or go-nowhere plots, but no, they all come into play. It's all staging an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine of fuck-ups for the night, and when the machine kicks off, it's awesome. The movie clearly wants you to laugh AT these people, because they're terrible people, and gives you plenty of reason to do so. Where the movie is hurt is on the technical side. Continuity is one issue. For instance, there's a scene near the end where there's a fight between some people on the loading dock. In the span of 30 seconds, it goes from pitch black and raining to bright morning sky and clear. Clothing isn't consistent from scene to scene. Another issue is plot convenience; things just happen because they need to. Without spoiling it, there's a guy who is in a situation where he can't do anything or get out of it, cut away, come back a little while later, and he's out, with no explanation given. People and things go missing, and then turn up somewhere that makes no sense, and the movie doesn't tell you how they got from A to B. In a movie that is so tightly packed and densely scripted with chain reactions and decisions coming back to bite people later on, these oversights make no sense. And the main character's method of dispatching people is moronic, both for a nurse (or, really, anybody in general), and because when everything starts going to hell in a handbasket, we see WHY it would be bad. I'll say it's still worth a watch, because it was fun, in that demented way movies like this are. You're watching it to watch bad things happen to bad people, and it delivers. I just wish they tightened up a few things before calling it a day. It could've taken this from a good movie to a great one.