One of Them Days Review: SZA and Keke Palmer Aim to Join the Buddy-Comedy Canon

Written by Syreeta Singleton, a longtime member of the Issa Rae braintrust, One of Them Days, co-produced by Rae, feels deeply connected to the gender wars classic Insecure and the gone-too-soon Rap Sh!t, both city-specific comedies about female friendship and reaching new life stages. And, if you told me it was a TV pilot, I would believe you, which is to say that it doesn’t have the cinematic excess I like out of my big studio comedies. Their L.A. seems empty and restricted to a few locations that feel like they could all be on the same studio lot, instead of a living, breathing city where the possibilities are endless and you never know what’s around the corner. Director Lawrence Lamont throws a Band-Aid on that issue by using music to give the city a more lived-in feel: You might catch snippets of a Mustard beat, and the movie opens with a sound bite from Big Boy’s Neighborhood playing over the radio.

At its core, One of Them Days, is basically a beat-for-beat update of Friday. In the 1995 F. Gary Gray touchstone, Ice Cube and Chris Tucker are thick-skulled stoners in South Central who smoke the weed they were supposed to sell and have to pay back neighborhood kingpin Big Worm or face death. In their quest to get the money, they stumble into The Ghettos Tryin to Kill Me! hi-jinks, but most of the comedy comes from their slacking off and bullshitting conversations about nothing. Unfortunately, the jokes in One of Them Days come less from Palmer’s Dreux and SZA’s Alyssa hanging out and more from bits that come from a revolving door of famous comedians (Janelle James, Lil Rel Howery, Katt Williams) who pull up to do PG-13-approved versions of their thing. And, even more unfortunately, the conversations that Dreux and Alyssa have are not exactly knee-slappers. Dreux, with a lot of comedic jumpiness, voices her problems, as Alyssa responds with short quips or animated facial expressions. SZA is likable but limited, not charismatic enough to play off a scaled-back Keke Palmer. And, to be real, Friday only works because Chris Tucker is on a bender. There’s a reason all the sequels, which don’t have Tucker, resort to the kind of shock humor you get from comedies running on fumes. It’s hard to say there needs to be Another One of Them Days.