Mark Reviews Movies: THE DAY SHALL COME

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 26, 2019

His first name is Moses, and he runs the Six Star Commune and Farm, which has a Star of David as its logo, in Miami. His surname is al Shabaz, and his prayers for aid are directed to Allah. They're also aimed at other figures, such as Jesus and Black Santa, and at this point, it should be clear that Moses' religious doctrine isn't exactly consistent. He does know, though, that God has spoken to him through a duck, which is strange to him. That's not because the voice of an omniscient, omnipotent deity talked to him by way of a water fowl. It's because the ducks usually speak to him on behalf of Satan.

This character might be strangest of the collection of strange characters in The Day Shall Come, a comedy based on "a hundred stories" of assorted FBI stings in this post-9/11 world. The suggestion that he only "might be" the strangest character here should offer a clue as to how weird co-writer/director Chris Morris' film becomes.

Here's the other thing: Moses, played by Marchánt Davis, is clearly delusional, too. He doesn't quite understand his religious beliefs, his political ideology, his goals for making a new world, or what he's supposed to do with the knowledge that he believes has been divinely communicated to him. We can sympathize with that uncertainty, especially since Davis' performance frames the character as a naïve man, filled with conviction, instead of a mentally ill man, filled with delusions of grandeur and the potential for harm against himself or others.

Basically, Moses might be the strangest character here, but at least he has an excuse for why his words and actions are inconsistent, paradoxical, and, at time, nonsensical. The same, though, cannot be said of the other characters here, most of whom are agents for the FBI and officers for the local police, as well as criminal informants for both of those law-enforcement organizations.

They don't make much sense, either, but their only excuse is to rack up a certain number of arrests and convictions to show that the government's unending fight against terrorism is actually working. The point of Morris and Jesse Armstrong's screenplay, perhaps, is that, if this is working, maybe it's better if the collective of law enforcement took a bit of a vacation to clear its head, sort itself out, and actually prioritize genuine threats, instead of inventing them out of people like Moses.

The whole mess for the leader of an army (of four—five, if you include Moses' daughter) who doesn't believe in guns (only slings and toy crossbows for his soldiers) or revolution (It's just a matter of waiting for the world to change from its European-centric ways) begins when he, his family, and his compatriots are given an eviction notice from their commune. Ruben (Rodney Richardson), their landlord, wants cash or actual items that he can sell to clients, who are quite interested in radioactive material (Moses offers him a broken gun, saying that they just have to install some radiation to transform it into a ray gun).

Meanwhile, the local FBI branch has just had a technically successful bust of a possible terrorist (The sequence, which has an undercover informant putting the majority of numbers into a cellphone to detonate a "bomb" because the suspect is afraid of the number five, is hilarious on two fronts—the scene itself and the federal agents' realization that they're basically doing all the work for the suspect). Now, they need a new target. Kendra Glack (Anna Kendrick) has been keeping tabs on Moses, because of his anti-government rhetoric, and that's good enough for her boss Andy Mudd (Denis O'Hare), the Special Agent in Charge of the Miami branch.

Her plan is to enlist two criminal informants—one pretending to be the nephew of a sultan connected to al-Qaeda and the other pretending to be the sultan—to tempt Moses with an arsenal of automatic weapons. Moses thinks he's getting a few hundred bucks to expand his chicken farm. When the informant explains that they're actually talking about tens of thousands of dollars, Moses' tune about being anti-gun changes—or at least it does in front of the "sultan" and, unbeknownst to him, the FBI.

The big, assumed questions here are how much of the FBI's temptation is legitimate police work and at what point does it just become straight-up entrapment. This easily could be a film filled with outrage about how easily the line between those two things—one legal and one illegal—can be crossed, but instead, Morris and Armstrong see this government-mandated expectation of safety and the resulting chaos as the well-deserved targets of scornful mockery.

Making us mad about such a state of affairs is easy. It's much harder to make us laugh at how ridiculous all of this is—not only because the subject matter seems like no laughing matter, but also because treating it as comedy might come across as making light of obvious injustice.

Smartly, the film cranks up the absurdity to, well, absurd levels. The guns (which Moses plans to use as fence posts) become uranium ("It'll grow hair on your chest," Moses uses as a selling point, "and then make it fall off."). The uranium is to be sold to a group that would seem to want nothing to do with Moses' black-nationalist ideology (who definitely aren't what they appear to be, anyway), and at one point, Moses just walks into the FBI headquarters, looking to receive a reward for informing on himself. There's a running gag with a horse, because Moses believes a general should have one. That might be the most rational thing anyone says throughout the course of the madcap plot.

Morris and Armstrong's dialogue, filled with insults and paradoxes and simply some great one-liners, shines, especially in one scene when Kendra and Andy have a long debate about the non-existent existence of a nuclear threat against the city (The boss suggests that the logic of the inherently contradictory statement is there—as long as one says it very slowly). Beneath the running gags and the one-off setpieces, though, there is a genuine sense of outrage to The Day Shall Come. Laughter won't fix this mess, but it certainly makes the problem easier to comprehend and digest.

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