Deborah Ross

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

Morris asks us to laugh at someone I’m not sure we should be laughing at

issue 12 October 2019

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.

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