The Day Shall Come (2019)

October 7, 2019 3:17 PM

An impoverished preacher who brings hope to the Miami projects is offered cash to save his family from eviction. He has no idea his sponsor works for the FBI who plan to turn him into a criminal by fueling his madcap revolutionary dreams.

Recent Metafilter thread about director Chris Morris.
The movie is inspired by "a hundred true stories", but much of the plot seems derived from the Liberty City Seven case.

• Variety: the only thing more outrageous than the jokes are the facts that inspired it
• TimeOut: There‘s no shortage of his usual zingers but Chris Morris fires a few too many blanks in this FBI-skewering terrorism satire
• RogerEbert.com: even when [Morris'] political souffle collapses (especially in its directionless and underwhelming last act), the performers keep the whole affair watchable

posted by elgilito (3 comments total)

Chris Morris' previous film is the widely acclaimed Four Lions (2010), a dark comedy about a group of radically stupid homegrown jihadis planning to bomb the London Marathon. Four Lions was quite successfull in that it was both (horribly) funny and actually realistic, and it's impossible not to think about that movie when reading for instance about the failed plot against Notre-Dame de Paris, or Jawad Bendaoud, from the Tough Guy Entrance meme. A terrorist wannabe in my town (who planned to attack two local churches) killed a woman in cold blood and then shot himself in the leg by accident. Morris insists that The Day Shall Come is completely different and he's right: the movie is not about terrorists, but about collateral victims of the War on Terror™.

Which is possibly why TDSC feels a little bit disappointing: in Four Lions, we knew that under the antics of the jihadis there was an actual willingness to kill. They were stupid and delusional, but focused, and, like their real-life counterparts, they ended up killing people. Laughing at them felt a little cathartic. The Star of Six people in TDSC are also delusional but their antics are just that, antics. Leader Moses believes that the CIA his hiding dinosaurs and that he'll be able to summon them with the revolution comes. In the end, he and his buddies are just poor guys with mental issues (Moses doesn't take his medication because it makes him drowsy). The FBI, who are the real baddies here, are also engaging in antics, a non-stop verbal exchange of zingers ("The only thing smaller than your badge is your dick, it's probably inverted like a belly button", says Anna Kendrick's character to a fellow cop). The problem is that, like those of the Star of Six, these antics are funny but ultimately irrelevant and sort of get in the way of the story. I'm wondering if a straight version would not have been preferable. Michael Bay's Pain and Gain was based on a similarly over-the-top true story, but let the characters be themselves, for instance.

Still, it's a good movie. Anna Kendrick is great at deadpan delivery, and newcomer Marchánt Davis (as Moses) gives his character a touching sweetness. Kayvan Novak, who played the very, very dumb Waj in Four Lions ("I think I might be confused, but I'm not sure"), and a not so bright vampire in the What We do in the Shadows series, plays a paedophile informant probably inspired by the rapist informant used by the FBI in the actual Liberty City case.
posted by elgilito at 4:59 PM on October 7, 2019

Finally caught up with this. Given that it's about a team of white people whose job it is to systematically frame black people for crimes - as [spoilers, I guess] the white people all end up rewarded, even though incompetent, and the black people all end up in prison for decades, even though innocent, it seems quite timely.

There are no actual criminals in the film, by the way, and no actual crimes. Just police and FBI fabricating excuses to arrest black people.
posted by Grangousier at 1:59 PM on June 20, 2020

Oh, come to think of it, Reza the Shopkeeper is an actual criminal, but then he's not arrested for paedophilia, so I suppose that doesn't count.
posted by Grangousier at 5:07 AM on June 21, 2020