Army of One (2016) - Review

Army of One is an ... interesting movie. I'm not even sure I can give a review an honest try. I never try to be objective when I'm writing an opinion piece, like reviews are, but I'm not even sure that there is enough substance to me to give to a formal critique. Frustrated American Gary Faulkner (Cage) has a mission delivered to him by flash of divine inspiration from God (Russell Brand) to travel to Pakistan to capture, but not kill, Osama bin Laden. There's no technical aspect that makes this movie special, and the script leaves a lot to be desired; reading the synopsis of real events that happened in the movie was a lot more interesting than seeing Nic Cage torture himself with a high-pitched, nasally voice and undergo a series of extraordinarily uninteresting events as he makes multiple attempts to cross into and traverse Pakistan to hunt the infamous international pariah. 

The longer the movie went on, the more I asked myself who this was for - I find this to be a really banal line of criticism, so I use this very judiciously. The comedic elements of the movie were very dull and for most of the runtime led me to feel secondhand embarrasment for everyone involved. There is a scene in a sporting goods section of a store where Faulkner purchases a hanglider, but not before he leans on a display of several canoes and makes it crash to the floor. There's not even an attempt for the actor playing a store clerk to chastise Faulkner for not only his clumsiness but making the rest of his day miserable reassembling the display. The scene carries on for some time and feels as if it might have been better placed in a hidden camera prank show instead of this movie's insistence at portraying this delusional man's story as a comedy of errors where the errors usually bring about some failure upwards. Granted, this is based off a real person's life where success does not happen in this venture, however the movie needed a compelling reason to tell this story.

Look, I do not and will not assign a rating to movies, and this is no exception. I even go out of my way to find something that I enjoy in movies and praise them for that, but I can't muster one reason to enjoy or watch this one ever again. I don't regret watching this movie but I will not recommend that someone put themselves through the misery of doing so.