'Black Friday' (2021)


I've been hankering for a little Bruce Campbell just recently, but not quite enough to make the effort to go looking for my 'Evil Dead' collection (it's been a long week...) so when I saw 'Black Friday' advertised on Prime Video, I thought to myself, 'I'll have some of that...'

I can't quite make my mind up whether I'm too late for last Black Friday or too early for the next one, a little bit of both I reckon. Either way, I've only got time for a short post tonight so lets crack on...

Overworked, underpaid and ready for the apocalypse. It's the biggest sale of the year and this time round the shoppers are out of their mind and out for blood. Fighting for their lives a misfit group of employees including shop manager Jonathan (Bruce Campbell - Evil Dead) find themselves fighting for survival against shoppers on a murderous rampage.

So I watched 'Black Friday' this morning and it wasn't a bad film to kick off a slightly lazy, not quite awake yet, Saturday. You get minimum explanation as to what is going on (or why), you're just thrown in the deep end and left to fend for yourself with the employees of 'We Love Toys'. There isn't an awful lot of backstory to get to grips with so this seems like the best approach; bung a whole load of monsters and some hapless store workers in a toy store, shake well and stand back for...

Well, the results are fun but I'll be honest with you; if you asked me about this film in a week's time, I'm not sure how much I'd remember. It's fun but not particularly memorable. I suspect that the hour and twenty four minute runtime has something to do with this. In such a short space, you really need to know what your movie is aiming for and that's not the case here. 'Black Friday' tries to be a number of things all at once and doesn't leave itself the time, or space, to focus on one thing and do it well. 'Black Friday' is fun with some decent looking monsters providing the scares (a little 'too Deadite' but maybe that's just me) and some fairly engaging characters (with Bruce Campbell being Bruce Campbell, which is never a bad thing). It just feels rushed though with somehow not enough time spent with the monsters and not enough time really getting to know our players.

And that's a real shame because 'Black Friday' is fun to watch and you can see how it could have been a lot more. It was just the thing for a lazy Saturday morning though (you can more or less leave your brain in neutral and just let this movie happen to it) and that was what I needed so it's not like I'm not grateful for that. If you ever find yourself experiencing a similar Saturday, this could be your movie too.

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