06-25-2020, 02:45 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-25-2020, 02:54 PM by TM2YC. Edited 2 times in total.)
The Day Shall Come (2019)
I've followed the career of UK satirist genius Chris Morris since the early 90s but his latest film sadly just didn't work for me. In a post-911 setting, the FBI manufacture a terrorist crisis for themselves to solve and therefore look like they did their jobs. It's inspired by real cases such as the 'Liberty City Seven'. The target they choose is a sweet-natured, harmless crazy called Moses, who is running a bizarre but benevolent cult commune with his family and two followers. The scenes with Moses work well because Marchant Davis is such a likeable screen presence and his collective feel real and grounded, despite the nonsense things they believe. The scenes with the FBI are jarringly different, a hurricane of barely comprehensible ball-breaking dialogue by irritating characters (Anna Kendrick is miscast). I think it would have worked better if the FBI had been portrayed as cool, calculating and cynical (which was probably nearer the truth), rather than zany, hand-wavy people, running round like headless chickens. Their actions should have been silly but I don't think their personalities should've been. There's a brief section when the film is really working when Moses is farcically confounding the FBI at every turn by shear naive stupidity. I don't know what we were supposed to take away from the abrupt ending... Moses = good/pawn / FBI = bad/incompetent? We got that in the first minutes of the movie didn't we? Rolling credits timed with the drums on Prince's 'The Cross' was a great move.
I've followed the career of UK satirist genius Chris Morris since the early 90s but his latest film sadly just didn't work for me. In a post-911 setting, the FBI manufacture a terrorist crisis for themselves to solve and therefore look like they did their jobs. It's inspired by real cases such as the 'Liberty City Seven'. The target they choose is a sweet-natured, harmless crazy called Moses, who is running a bizarre but benevolent cult commune with his family and two followers. The scenes with Moses work well because Marchant Davis is such a likeable screen presence and his collective feel real and grounded, despite the nonsense things they believe. The scenes with the FBI are jarringly different, a hurricane of barely comprehensible ball-breaking dialogue by irritating characters (Anna Kendrick is miscast). I think it would have worked better if the FBI had been portrayed as cool, calculating and cynical (which was probably nearer the truth), rather than zany, hand-wavy people, running round like headless chickens. Their actions should have been silly but I don't think their personalities should've been. There's a brief section when the film is really working when Moses is farcically confounding the FBI at every turn by shear naive stupidity. I don't know what we were supposed to take away from the abrupt ending... Moses = good/pawn / FBI = bad/incompetent? We got that in the first minutes of the movie didn't we? Rolling credits timed with the drums on Prince's 'The Cross' was a great move.
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