Farcical fake news is put to the sword in FBI satire The Day Shall Come.
Funny until it makes you sad, “The Day Shall Come” may lack the bitingly mundane bleakness of “Four Lions” thanks to its sunny Florida setting, but it’s no less depressing as it exposes the farcical side of false flag operations.
Moses Al Shabazz (Marchánt Davis) is a self-styled radical black preacher plotting to overthrow the white man and take on the forces of gentrification from his urban Miami stronghold. At least that’s how the US’ national security agencies are desperate to paint him. The only problem is, he has amassed a following of just three and struggles to make ends meet on his rundown city farm while preaching a strictly pacifist no weapons approach that instead puts faith in the power of avenging dinosaurs summoned by a trumpet call.
Faced with a wholly harmless opponent, the Feds start trying to tempt him into increasingly large scale criminal acts so they can swoop in, crush the vicious terrorists and continue to demand and justify the vast federal budgets allocated to counter-terrorism. Where the incompetence is evenly spread between the would-be revolutionaries and the federal government, the duplicity is not and its frighteningly credible in how it shows how far the authorities will compromise their so-called principles to achieve their arbitrary aims when Moses innocently thwarts their plans because his real objectives are very different from those they suspect.
Marchánt Davis is superb as the devoutly deluded Moses, giving him just the right balance of pathos and pluck to convince you he could have led a movement had his ideas not been quite so barmy (blame the advice he takes from the horse’s mouth) while on the other side of the equation, Anna Kendrick retains just the right amount of humanity to allow her ambitious FBI agent’s conscience to prickle just a little bit. And while the political satire and procedural farce may give “The Day Shall Come” its biggest laughs, it’s in the abundant, gloriously fallible humanity and domestic intimacy that the film shows its heart and elevates the comedy to tragedy.
