Only fitfully funny: Chris Morris’s The Day Shall Come reviewed

The Day Shall Come is a second feature from British satirist Chris Morris and like the first, Four Lions, it is a ‘comedy of terrors’, you could say. But this time, rather than a group of hapless home-grown Muslim suicide bombers we’ve decamped to America and it’s the FBI that will do anything to get their man even if that man is harmless and insists that God speaks to him through a duck. It is funny, fitfully, but it asks us to laugh at someone I wasn’t sure we should be laughing at, plus it is repetitive and acts like we didn’t get the joke the first time, when we did. Or, at least, I did. You may be slower-witted, of course.

This is based on ‘a hundred true stories’, say the opening credits, which should rightly put the fear of God into you. (I don’t have the space to go into Chris Morris’s research, but look up the 2006 case of a ‘religious army’ planning to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower.) Here, our main character is Moses (Marchant Davis), who lives in the Miami projects and is a self-proclaimed preacher and leader of a mission that has an army. Of four. Yes, he wants to halt white gentrification and overthrow the government but he also has other, more important items on his agenda, like worshipping ‘Black Santa’, worrying about the CIA’s ability to summon dinosaurs with trumpets and hearing what his duck has to say.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town you have the FBI who have just messed up a sting and need to recover their reputation. Or, as one suit puts it: ‘Pitch me the next 9/11!’ One particularly ambitious agent, Kendra Glack (Anna Kendrick), spots Moses on social media preaching about ‘brotherhood’ and kicks off a manic series of events to prove he is dangerous.