Metacritic reviews

A bloody screwball comedy, a film of high spirits. It tells a complicated story with acute timing and clarity, and gives us drug-dealing lowlifes who are almost poetic in their clockwork dialogue.

What ensues is an uneasy mix of farcical slapstick and comedy of errors with a violent, blood-soaked tale of inner-city crime.

Predictable, and stereotypical.

Next Day Air can't decide whether it's a broad stoner comedy or a gritty Tarantino-esque action flick. The humor is there, but violence brings the laughter to an abrupt halt.

Routine stuff, but things move quickly, with several offhand funny moments. Mos Def is hilarious in a cameo as another delivery guy.

The right combination of goofy character behavior, action set pieces, and narrative drive to keep the movie from ever being boring.

I wished Next Day Air were funnier. In the end, it's a fitfully amusing, sloppy comedy that doesn't work very hard for your 10 bucks.

None of these characters provides more than a smattering of laughs, but Def is the one guy we might like to see more of, if only because his role is small and better executed than it deserves.

That's about all Next Day Air can muster by way of invention, trying to slap a new face on a gaggle of rote gestures in a vain attempt to cover its own uselessness. But no matter how big the guns it draws, every shot is a dud.

This movie could really use an Avon Barksdale, but even actor Wood Harris, who played drug kingpin Barksdale in "The Wire," seems a bit lost.