Although were used to seeing him in things like Ride Along and the Jump Street movies nowadays, Ice Cube and comedy werent words you were used to seeing in the same sentence when Friday came out back in 1995. Two decades later and the tale of Craig getting fired on his day off and Smokey trying to duck Big Worm after smoking all of his weed is as funny as it ever was, though the same cannot be said of the sequel, which was hard work even at the first time of watching. While Friday had an excess of attitude and energy, Next Friday was severely lacking in both, abandoning the dialogue-heavy approach for stale sub-plots that seemed to go absolutely nowhere. When Chris Tucker failed to sign up to reprise his role for the sequel (which is a red flag right at the get-go) Mike Epps was brought in to play funny to Ice Cubes straight, but he just wasnt Smokey. With Tucker out of the picture, Cube and his regular co-writer DJ Pooh should have opted to stay behind the camera and bring in some younger blood to portray teenage versions of Craig and Smokey. If spending the entire day on and around your porch in South Central Los Angeles can be so eventful, a day in high school must be off the charts. A prequel should have shown us Craig and Smokey on their first day of school and how the friendship that made the first film work so well was born. Both actors were in their early twenties when Friday came out and could have even chosen to appear as younger versions of their characters, seeing as most Hollywood high schools are filled with a bunch of 30-something extras anyway.
