Fleapit revisited:The Day Shall Come.

Underwhelmed*! That's not the adjective you'd hope would come to mind leaving the cinema after seeing a film by arch-satirist Chris Morris. But it's probably the one that best describes The Day Shall Come, his new movie. It's not that the film's bad, it's actually pretty good. It's just that it could be much much better. It could be more scathing, it could be funnier, and it could be more emotional.

Basically, it could be more extreme in every way. Which is what you'd expect from Morris. The tough thing about having produced such a wealth of classic material is that you'll always end up being judged against your own past (even when, in the case of Morris, you're quite clearly now trying to do something very different). However, it could be argued if Morris had not made the likes of Brass Eye and The Day Today he'd not be in a position to be directing grand scale cinematic releases.

 

That, sadly, in the case of the Broughton Cineworld, only three people had shown up to see! It's possible that the lack of any major stars and a story about the FBI trying to induce cult members in Miami's Liberty City into attempting to commit terrorist acts so that they can then arrest them and satisfy both their targets and their superiors is hardly box office gold to the good burghers of Flintshire.

Their loss was not a great one. This is not a film you particularly need to see on the big screen. As I remarked on the journey home, to much hilarity about how past it I now am, it's one you can easily appreciate if you wait for it to come out on DVD.

I may have been an accidental enthusiast for defunct formats in my post-cinema analysis but The Day Shall Come tells a story that is anything but defunct. Based on hundreds of similar cases across the USA, it tells the tale of Moses Al Shabaz (Marchant Davis) who runs a small, very small - three other members, religious commune in Miami. The Star of Six (for that is its name) drive round in a converted yellow school bus, operate some kind of syncretic belief system that mixes Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, and worship both 'Black Santa' and Toussaint L'Ouverture.

Oh, and Moses believes he can communicate with ducks. Horses too. He's kind - but cranky. He's a loving father - but a terrible businessman. One scene sees him offering a bag of potatoes to his sleazy landlord in lieu of rent, only for it to be revealed that, instead of potatoes, he'd been sold a bag of logs.

 

The excellently named FBI agent Kendra Glack (Anna Kendrick) has recently failed to frame a pentaphobic man for detonating a bomb that would have killed scores of Spring Breakers on Miami Beach and needs to redeem herself in the eyes of her boringly chauvinistic male colleagues and bosses. So she sends Reza (Kayvan Novak plays a paedophile shopkeeper who is only free due to his cooperation with the FBI) to Moses to lie to him that he's acting on behalf of a rich Sheikh uncle (Nura, Pej Vahdat) who'd like to supply the Star of Six with firearms and money.

This causes ructions within the Star of Six and within Moses' family, it results in ludicrous outfits that look like pimped up shower curtains, talking horses, and people sitting on desks rather than behind them. It also means the Star of Six are sent to sell weapons themselves to a corrugated iron shed load of neo-Nazis, a group who are already so cliched and recherche in their beliefs that they're almost beyond parody anyway.

 

As the web widens it starts to look as if almost everybody involved is in the pay of the FBI. You start to suspect the whole of Miami are unwilling stooges in a series of morally bankrupt and woefully planned sting attempts, mostly doomed to failure. It's masterful in gently showing how symbiotic the relationship between the FBI and the terrorists is. They both need each other to justify their existence. At a time when Trump has withdrawn his support for the Kurds in Syria all but ensuring the release of IS prisoners and greatly increasing the risk of further terror attacks across Europe this is not small beer. The populist leaders, now rising globally and terrifyingly, need enemies to fight and if these enemies aren't dangerous enough to get them elected they'll elevate the danger or even invent it. It was deadly enough when Tony Blair did so with his WMDs but now Trump and Johnson do so as easily as they breathe.

So it's a pity that it's when the action cuts to the men in suits that the film really flounders. We see Glack dealing with, or containing, her boss Andy Mudd (Denis O'Hare) and her colleague Settmonk (James Adomian) but the supposedly witty banter never really flies, it barely provides exposition, and indications that the story may take a feminist detour and shine a light on sexual abuse in the upper echelons of the bureau come to nothing. A few neat nods towards mansplaining and Glack flinching and pushing Settmonk away every time he invades her personal space are all you get. It's tacitly suggested that, as a strong female, these things wouldn't affect Glack anyway. I felt if they were going to explore that area they needed to do it properly. Skimming over it felt perfunctory.

Buying logs instead of potatoes, FBI men spilling coffee down their shirts, and filling uranium canisters with 'piss and beans'! These scenes try hard but just don't elicit any genuine lols, and even the few laughs that do come are more of the NFT 'I recognise that reference' style than from the belly. You expect more from Morris and given stories as bizarre as this it's quite remarkable he's not been able to do more with the topic. Perhaps he got bogged down in the studio system. Perhaps there were more outre ideas that got vetoed by board room. Or perhaps he's made a film that's good - where he should, and could, have made a film that was great.

Marchant Davis is excellent as Al Shabaz. His mix of bruised male pride, complete lack of guile, and a sweetly sentimental dedication to his wife, his child, and his people all make for a nuanced character that you find yourself genuinely rooting for. The rest of the cast are mostly decent too, with special mentions to Kendrick who makes the most of getting the shitty end of the script and Danielle Brooks as Venus, Moses' wife. But good acting, a good story, and a powerful message disappointingly fail to translate into truly great cinema.

*This was not my choice of word but that of Michelle who I'd like to thank for joining me on this trip and also, to her and Evie, for another lovely weekend of vegan Chinese food, swimming, mountains, walking, Discos, and Thai food in Chester x