The Day Shall Come, 2019.
Directed by Chris Morris.
Starring Marchánt Davis, Anna Kendrick, Denis O’Hare, Danielle Brooks, Malcolm Mays, Jim Gaffigan and Kayvan Novak.
SYNOPSIS:
A desperate preacher becomes embroiled in an FBI sting when he accepts money to take part in a deal involving uranium and a terrorist plot.
Chris Morris is never in any hurry to get the job done. The satirist extraordinaire behind Brass Eye and The Day Today works slowly and deliberately in order to craft his memorable works. Other than directing a few episodes of political sitcom Veep for pal Armando Iannucci, Morris has been quiet since the daring terrorism comedy Four Lions hit cinemas in 2010. From out of nowhere, then, The Day Shall Come has arrived, having been shot in secret in the Dominican Republic in 2017 and 2018. Unfortunately, it’s a muddled misfire that lacks the precision-tooled fizz of the director’s best work.
The film is set in a paranoid world – “based on a hundred true stories” according to the opening titles – in which the FBI is desperate to prove itself able to take down terrorist threats, preventing the next 9/11. They’re now using informants to essentially convince potential terrorists to incriminate themselves for attacks they haven’t even decided to commit yet. One of these people is Moses (Marchánt Davis), who runs the tiny Son of Six commune. He preaches a black uprising over white oppressors on Facebook, but opposes violence. Ambitious FBI agent Kendra (Anna Kendrick) decides he’s the perfect target to be tricked into a sting operation.
Davis is charming as Moses – a thematic cousin to the hapless jihadis at the heart of Four Lions. Some of his words are incendiary and ostensibly dangerous, but he also believes that God spoke to him through a duck and that dinosaurs still exist. He spends most of his time trying to keep his small farm afloat and taking part in silly, quasi-military training exercises with his slacker followers. Davis nails the oblivious persona of his character, who is out of his depth when things get serious and has a core of obvious niceness, despite his rhetoric.
Unfortunately, the film is a chaotic and unfocused beast. It runs less than 90 minutes and feels in a hurry to get its point across, to the extent that it misses a lot of crucial scene-setting and exposition, as well as any fallout to the events. If it emerged that they’d accidentally shot the movie with 10 pages missing from either end of the script, it would be easy to believe that was the case. Morris’ acerbic comic energy shines through in isolated scenes of bureaucratic chaos, but these are few and far between amid a script that misses far more regularly than it hits.
This difficulty comes through most clearly in the case of the FBI half of the story. Morris depicts them as ridiculous and petty – they shoot at each other with Nerf guns – and simply working to stay afloat and preventing a scenario in which “the Statue of Liberty is wearing a burka and we’ve beheaded Bruce Springsteen”. Kendrick sparkles with her usual peppy snark, but is constantly grappling with material that never has the snap and crackle it needs. A side plot involving Four Lions alum Kayvan Novak as an informant with an unsavoury side sits very awkwardly with some of the broader comedy. It’s a distinctly Morris joke in a film that is often unmoored from that sense of voice and style.
It just seems like there’s a bite missing from The Day Shall Come. This is Morris on less focused form and without the precise laser beam of spiky energy and wit that has ensured that much of his work is still talked about and revered years later. While there are obvious bright spots in some of the performances, the narrative rushes by with far too much pace to ever truly land, leaving little room for the outrage and anger that an audience should feel when watching this stuff in the knowledge that it’s really happening.
The received wisdom in the world of the thinkpiece is that we’re currently living in an era too absurd for satire. When even the reliable teeth of Chris Morris appear to have been smoothed to nothing, there’s definitely some truth in that.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Tom Beasley is a freelance film journalist and wrestling fan. Follow him on Twitter via @TomJBeasley for movie opinions, wrestling stuff and puns.
