by Jerky » Tue Oct 15, 2019 6:14 am
Here's my review of THE DAY SHALL COME
Christopher Morris is, in my opinion, a talent on par with Stanley Kubrick, and the Anglosphere’s single greatest satirist since none other than Johnathan Swift. His output has always been outstanding, beginning in the 90’s with surreal pranks and dada-style antics on the radio, followed up with some of the most revolutionary and controversial “comedy” television in the history of the medium (The Day Today, Brass Eye, the too-good-for-its-own-good Nathan Barley, and the absolutely terrifying Jam), leading up to 2010’s Four Lions, his magnificent debut feature film about bumbling Islamic terrorists in the UK.
And then… radio silence. Oh, sure, he directed a few episode of his pal Armando Iannucci’s excellent HBO series VEEP, and he’s made a handful of onscreen appearances (perhaps most memorably as the sinister boss-man Denholm Reynholm in The IT Crowd). But for six long years, we heard only snippets from the man. And then, a couple years ago, we learned that he was working on a new project. Another film! Slowly, information about this new project began to leak out in dribs and drabs. It was to be another terrorism-related film, but very different from Four Lions. It was to be set in the USA… Miami. It was to be shot in Dominican Republic. It was to be called The Day Shall Come. It was to star Anna Kendrick.
And then, last week, it came out. And I watched it. And I was underwhelmed.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not bad. And it’s quite funny. And it has some important and true things to say about the moral rot, hypocrisy and idiocy at the heart of the post 9/11 War On Terror. It is also incisive about both racism in the USA, and the inherent insufficiency of the rhetoric and the attitudes that have risen up to confront these problems. And the jokes are good, and land with admirable regularity. It deserves to be seen by as wide an audience as possible… and I think a Black audience in particular would appreciate what it has to offer.
It’s just that, on first viewing at least, unlike most of Morris’ previous work, it didn't feel like an unparalleled work of staggering genius.
So, what’s it about? Well, “based on a hundred true stories”, it’s about how the FBI sets up vulnerable, damaged people by offering them loads of money and weapons, and when the targets of their schemes show up to pick up what’s been offered, they arrest them, tell the world they stopped the next 9/11, lock them up and throw away the key.
It’s worthy. It’s funny. It’s available online for relatively cheap. It just didn’t knock my socks off, that’s all.