Russell Brand is God and Nicolas Cage Hunts Osama Bin Laden in the Unwatchable 2016 Misfire Army of One
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On paper, the 2016 comedy Army of One looked like one of the most promising projects of Cage’s late-period career. Considering what a profound creative and professional slump Cage was in when he made the wildly under-achieving would-be satire that’s setting the bar awfully low.
At the very least, Army of One promised a change of pace from the largely indistinguishable action movies the famously prolific and undiscriminating actor had been pumping out for the home video market.
Everything about it looked different. The film was directed by comedy guru Larry Charles, a major voice on Seinfeld who then moved to Curb Your Enthusiasm and, to a lesser degree, Dilbert and Entourage.
On the motion picture front Charles co-wrote and directed the Bob Dylan vanity project Masked & Anonymous before striking box-office gold as the director of the surprise blockbuster Borat and then Bruno.
For the purpose of Army of One, however, Charles’ most important and regrettable credit is as the director of the unforgivably smug, god-awful documentary manifesto Religulous.
Religulous was devoted to the principle that religion is dumb, and having faith and believing in God is dumb and that people of faith should have their stupid delusions destroyed by Bill Maher, who is a very intelligent atheist too brainy and realistic to be fooled by any of that superstitious nonsense.
So Maher traveled around the world with Charles and told religious people that they were stupid and naive. In the process he brought us all together and struck an important blow against religious extremism in the process.
Army of One is powered by the same smug, empty nihilism as Religulous. It is a comedy divided against itself, possibly as a result of the film being taken out of Charles’ hands and re-edited by Bob Weinstein.
When I see the Weinsteins listed in the end credits of movies I almost invariably think, “Ah, so those were the REAL villains.”
That’s true here. I can’t imagine a cut of Army of One that’s halfway decent, let alone good. But it doesn’t have to be this terrible or confused.
The main problem with Army of One is that it wants audiences to laugh long and hard and derisively at its obnoxious real-life anti-hero Gary Faulkner for being a pony-tail sporting, flag-waving, stoned doofus so oblivious that he thinks that he can hunt down and capture Osama Bin Laden despite having no relevant training or experience.
“Get a load of this fucking idiot! Can you even believe the bullshit he’s spouting?” is the film’s attitude until it gets all gooey and sentimental and tries to convince us that underneath all of his bluster, bravado and drunk talk lies a heart of gold and a profoundly good man who cares about his family, his country and his loved ones.
In its third act Army of One goes even further in its unsuccessful romanticization of Faulkner acting aggressively on the dictates of intense mental illness. The movie cynically tries to posit Faulkner as a hero for having a big vision and following his dreams when he accomplished nothing beyond making a boozy, bleary spectacle of himself.
Faulkner may have failed in his quest to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice but he succeeded in becoming famous, after a fashion, and having Nicolas Cage play him in what he must poignantly have believed would be a major motion picture.
In our screwy, mixed-up modern world, isn’t that fame as good, if not better, than the kind that comes with capturing the world’s most wanted man?
The happy ending might have worked if it was bleakly ironic or tongue-in-cheek but by that point Charles seems to have given up.
Army of One has many, many problems. Narration that positively reeks of post-production meddling by the Weinsteins is one of its most egregious flaws. The mock-deadpan narration delivers exposition and information but mostly it spouts canned sarcasm that underlines and highlights that the filmmakers, being intelligent, skeptical, rationale people, not unlike Bill Maher, think that Gary Faulkner is a fucking idiot, just the dumbest, drunkest, most deluded, xenophobic white trash cartoon imaginable.
The movie wants us to think that Faulkner is the worst of the worst, the ugliest ugly American but also, simultaneously the best of the best, a man of vision and persistence who embodies the can-do spirit that makes out country great.
Army of One begins by positing Faulkner as a paradoxical patriot hippie, a laid-back, work-averse dude who just wants to get high and hang out and also protect our country from all enemies, domestic and otherwise.
Sure, he talks shit about every country other than God’s own United States but he doesn’t mean it. It’s all just harmless banter from a guy who likes to talk and isn’t too concerned about what he says.
Army of One tugs at the heartstrings mercilessly and shamelessly with a romance between the most annoying man in the history film, no small feat considering how many motion pictures Eddie Deezen has made, and Marci Mitchell (Wendi McClendon-Covey), a single mother whose daughter is mute and has Down syndrome.
McClendon-Covey is a brilliant improviser who made her name as a cast-member on Reno 911!, a fully improvised show. McClendon-Covey never gets a chance to be funny because she spends pretty much every moment onscreen being touched to the point of weeping that anyone is willing to be nice to her and her disabled child, even a man with less than nothing going for him.
I spend far too much time on Reddit and there is a lot of discourse on various subReddits devoted to the toxic idea of the “Nice Guy” who isn’t nice at all, but just pretends to be to try to get laid.
These faux Nice Guys are always angrily asking a silent and cruel God, who may or may not also be a Feminizi, why women go for tall, attractive, confident men with money when the Nice Guys they leave in the dreaded Friend Zone would have treated them like queens and never leave.
Gary is the quintessential Nice Guy Who Treats an Attractive Woman like a queen. The movie seems to be of the mindset that if you are a woman in your thirties or forties and you have a disabled child then you’re just going to have to settle for an unattractive, mentally ill man with no money who is going to leave you for months in a bizarre, unsuccessful quest to kill Osama Bin Laden. That’s the best you can possibly hope for.
Army of One wishes that wasn’t the case but is at least reasonable enough to have Marci fall all over Gary because he’s apparently the only person in the world who has ever shown her or her daughter kindness.
So when Gary tells her that God told him to get Osama Bin Laden she has no choice but to wish him well and hope he doesn’t die a horrible death during his impossible mission.
In Pakistan Gary mostly smokes a lot of hash and has delusions. He does not capture Osama Bin Laden. He doesn’t accomplish anything. His time in Pakistan is as pointless as the film itself.
Cage is an extraordinarily likable actor yet he delivers a perversely grating, unlikable performance. Yet the film’s nauseatingly maudlin streak forces buddies like Pickles (a visibly frustrated Paul Scheer) to look at him like he’s the second Coming of James Stewart all the same, just a great, great, colorful guy he’s happy to know.
Gary is unlikable yet the movie keeps trying to convince us that everyone loves him, even the foreigners he rails against ignorantly in the abstract but apparently digs once they’re face to face.
Cage makes a lot of bold choices here that very aggressively don’t work. For example, he had the nasal, aggressive whine of a Poindexter who thinks that every time he opens his mouth he’s making a VERY GOOD POINT yet the film closes with footage of the real Gary not talking anything like that. It’s like Gotti closing with images of the real John Gotti so audiences could see that Travolta doesn’t look like him in the least.
If you’re going to make up a voice for a real person why go with the most grating one imaginable? Army of One wants us to laugh derisively at Gary and his stupidity but also to feel for him because he’s the hero and a good guy, possibly?
Late in Army of One there is a scene that epitomizes its cognitive dissonance and tonal confusion. Gary sees and hears Barack Obama talking about killing Osama Bin Laden and breaks down.
He doesn’t know how to respond. On one hand, the thing he has ostensibly been working towards has finally been achieved. Yet it had nothing to do with him and leaves him without a quest or a purpose.
This is just about the only time the film acknowledges that Gary’s quest was an expression of mental illness and not just a zany hobby.
As for Brand, he’s every bit as glib and obnoxious as you’d expect although I suspect the Brand of today would see Gary as an important voice outside the mainstream media echo chamber and invite him onto his podcast so he can share his very important, valid views with other free thinkers such as himself.
It’s a testament to how badly Army of One misfires that it came out the same year that Donald Trump was elected, giving rise to QAnon, yet the movie does not feel prescient in the least. It has nothing to say about QAnon warriors because its protagonists is a zany lone wolf leading an offline existence, not part of a wave of deeply deluded Americans who are convinced that they have an important, active role to play in national and international politics.
Army of One did turn out to be different than the generic action-thrillers Cage was making at the time. It’s not as bad: it’s worse.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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