Jenkins stars as a career fast-food cook forced to train his unwilling young successor in Andrew Cohn’s undercooked small-town drama
In writer-director Andrew Cohn’s deceptively modest drama The Last Shift, fast-food worker Stanley (Richard Jenkins) is finally calling it quits. He has worked the graveyard shift at Oscar’s Chicken and Fish for 38 years, but now he’s moving from Michigan to
Florida to take care of his elderly mother; grease be gone.
He’s proud of his tenure, slickly handling the drunks and the teens who ridicule him, rarely putting a foot wrong. But when he’s forced to train his replacement, the opinionated twentysomething Jevon (Shane Paul McGhie), Stanley starts to reconsider his life’s work and whatever meaning he might have attached to it. Jevon is dismissive of the
Job, forced into it while on probation after defacing a federal monument, and aiming to return to his love of writing when his circumstances allow. Jevon is smart but difficult, failing his beleaguered girlfriend and young son, unable to knuckle down and provide.