Army of One (2016)

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Russell Brand, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Rainn Wilson, Matthew Modine, Will Sasso, Paul Scheer, and Adrian Martinez
Grade: B+

“You have to think crazy to accomplish crazy things”.

Summary

Through narration, we are told that in 2004, a part-time construction worker with bad kidneys named Gary Faulkner (Cage) claimed he was visited and given a mission by God himself to hunt down Osama bin Laden. Armed with a sword and a knife, we see Gary fly into Pakistan on a hang glider. After this initial intro, we jump back to when Gary was twelve years old, carrying a stick with a balloon attached to it as he walks down the street. Eventually, a bully shows up and pops his balloon, leaving with his group. The voice of God (Brand) comforts Gary, telling him that his stick is his sword, and he doesn’t need to fear anything in life as long as he carries it. He also says that sometime in the future, the bully will die in a meth deal gone bad.

So, I guess that’s pretty cool.

We then jump to 35 years later in 2004, in Greeley, Colorado. Gary, who is sleeping at the construction site he works at, gets a call from one of his best friends Pickles (Scheer), and he asks Pickles if he can stay at his place since he’s got nowhere to go at the moment. As the narrator tells us, he has been looked at to see if there’s anything wrong with him. Clinically speaking, he’s completely sane. Most of this story that follows this is to show you why these doctors have to be wrong sometimes.

Sitting at the bar, Gary, Pickles, and their other friend Roy (Sasso) watch on TV that the U.S. government still has no clue where Osama is at, with Gary talking about how terrible of a job they’re doing and how he could pull it off himself. A marine comes over to argue with Gary, prompting Gary to challenge him to a knife throwing contest to see who’s the more accurate thrower. If Gary wins, he wants a drink and an apology. After the marine goes first, Gary throws right after, but Roy walks in front and is stabbed in the chest.

Thankfully, it misses most of his tendons.

Later, as Gary walks through a hardware store and trashes all the items customers are looking at based off of what country it’s from, he runs into Marci Mitchell (McLendon-Covey), a girl he knew from high school. They are happy to see each other, and they both admit they had crushes on each other back in school. As they catch up, we learn Marci is a bit of a mess, but she’s trying. She’s been in and out of community college, works at Olive Garden, answers phones at a dentist’s office, and writes wedding invitations with calligraphy on them (which I didn’t even realize was a job). She then goes through her horrid track record in the dating world and talks about her sister who died of a drug overdose eight years ago. Her sister also had a child with her dealer, so Marci adopted her. Even with all of this information, they agree on going out in the next day or so, but she playfully gives him the task of trying to find her.

That night, Gary talks again about the Osama stuff and wanting to act on it while staying at Pickles’ house, but Pickles reminds him that it has now been three months and that he needs to leave his house. The next day, Gary goes to the hospital for dialysis and is visited by God. God tells Gary that he needs to capture Osama and bring him back alive to make up for 9/11, and Gary humbly accepts. Sometime after, Gary finds Marci’s house and brings over ice cream for her and Lizzie, Marci’s adopted daughter. Lizzie deals with a number of challenges too. She’s confined to a wheelchair due to her cerebral palsy and doesn’t talk, but she seems to enjoy Gary’s presence. As they eat, Gary explains his plan of buying a boat and sailing to Pakistan, despite having no prior knowledge of sailing. To make up for some of the money he has to spend to buy the boat, he intends on asking his doctor for a charitable donation to his cause. Additionally, he plans on taking Pickles and Roy to Las Vegas to potentially win some extra cash. After seeing how poorly made Lizzie’s wheelchair ramp is and after Marci kisses Gary on the cheek goodnight, he shows up the next morning with his friends to help build a new ramp outside. In Vegas, the boys go out and gamble, and Gary does particularly well. However, later that night, he’s attacked by Colombian drug lords in the hallway that take all of his money.

At least that’s what we think…

The next morning, he wakes up in the hotel room complaining about it, but he’s reminded by his friends that he lost all his money at the tables. We learn in the doctor’s office that he has a history with pre-dialysis hallucinations.

At the doctor’s office, he praises the doctor (Modine) for working hard with him and segues this directly into asking for a thousand dollars to help with buying his sailboat for his Pakistan mission. Realizing that the doctor is kind of freaking out because of Gary’s outlandish plan (correctly assuming that Gary is hallucinating), Gary tells him he lied, and he actually needs it for an engagement ring. In San Diego, Gary buys a boat. After breaking his arm trying to raise the sail and narrowly avoiding being arrested for being in someone else’s slip (while showing the patrolwoman on duty how crazy he is by telling her about his mission without a moment’s hesitation), he escapes the harbor. However, he crashes the boat elsewhere and wakes up on the coast of Mexico. Following this, he comes back to Marci’s and gives her and Lizzie gifts from Mexico. That night, Marci tells Gary how cool it is that Lizzie has taken to Gary so quickly, as it’s rare for her. This snowballs into the two admitting that they like each other, and they kiss. Gary stays the night and as he watches television, he sees God speaking to him again. This time, God is on a home shopping network channel, telling Gary how important it is he buy this samurai sword that’s for sale. Immediately after seeing this, Gary buys the sword and practices with it in Marci’s backyard with her. As he slices his sword through several fruits Marci tosses to him, he talks about his new plan to hang glide from a mountain in Israel and go straight into Pakistan. If it works, everything is good, but if he crashes, he’ll crash into the Dead Sea.

Because of the amount of salt that’s in the water, he’ll automatically float. This is a good thing because he doesn’t know how to swim.

She knows it’s a stupid plan, but Gary does his own thing and she’s accepted that.

He buys a hang glider, but he cuts it into several pieces to fit it into his luggage for his plane trip, despite specific instructions from the salesman not to do so because it’s all one piece. After getting into an argument with the luggage person at the airport over him trying to take his samurai sword with him, he gets a message from God to “pack it” anyway. Later, he runs off the cliff in Israel with his hang glider, only for the whole thing to break apart, with him falling and breaking his arm and leg. He goes back to Marci’s once again as doubt starts to creep in. After he gives Marci some gifts from Israel, they talk about their love for each other and the possibility of Gary not going to Pakistan and staying at home with her. Marci admits she’d love that, but she knows that if Gary truly believes in his mission, he’ll end up hating her for making him stay. That night at the bar, he tells his friends he’s decided to stay. However, after his friends leave, God shows up, and he’s angry. After threatening to smite Gary and erase him from existence, Gary re-accepts his mission, despite his love for Marci.

Pakistan, here we come!

My Thoughts:

At one point in a cave, we see Nicolas Cage take on Osama bin Laden himself in a sword fight somewhere in Pakistan. If you were on the fence about watching this movie, this should be reason enough for you to check this one out.

As we know, an unhinged Nicolas Cage is the best Nicolas Cage. Army of One, despite not being as well-known as some other films in Cage’s decade of the 2010s, shouldn’t be a knock on Cage’s resume. If anything, it should be another valid example of why he’s still such an incredible talent as an actor. I really enjoyed the outrageousness of Army of One. It was very funny and because of its off-kilter plot, it’s genuinely captivating at times. A lot of people may disagree with me because the internet trolls have trained people to hate on Cage for whatever reason, but that’s fine. I’ll still continue to defend this acting legend to my dying breath. Only with Cage will you get someone who never phones in a performance, even in the smallest of films. He is fully committed to the role he has, no matter the budget or the number of screens a movie is limited too.

Once again, Cage proves my point with Army of One.

Hate on the man all you want, but you can’t sit there and tell me that Cage’s performance as Gary Faulkner wasn’t fantastic. This movie is worth seeing just for this alone.

Cage completely commits to his role as the fast-talking, energetic, unhealthy, America-is-the-greatest-country-on-Earth, egotistical patriot that Gary Faulkner is. He’s hysterical as he rambles in monologues about his America-loving thoughts, and anti-everyone else, and rails off quote after hilarious quote while interacting with normal people that either react accordingly or just accept him for who he is. In doing so, you realize you’re in for a must-see Cage performance by the time the first ten minutes go by. Many point to films like Mandy, Color Out of Space, Pig, and Mom and Dad as some of Cage’s best performances over the last decade or so, but I’d argue Army of One needs to be in that conversation, despite the ups and downs of the narrative at times. Gary Faulkner is pure, over-the-top fun and is easily one of Cage’s most underrated roles. He is devoted to the character and makes sense of Gary’s delusions to the point where we are fully invested in seeing Gary pull off this outrageous mission, even though we all know what happened to bin Laden in real life. How can you forget him arguing with the airport worker about him wanting to take his samurai sword on the plane and after she tells him he can’t, he responds with the utmost sincerity yelling, “Tell that to George Washington!”? How about when he’s screaming at the top of his lungs at the CIA agents that they let Osama go while in the hospital, after hallucinating that he fought him in a cave?

Cage is all-in and so was I.

Though Gary may live in his own world, he fully believes in his mission and what is truly going on in front of him, even though a lot of what actually happened is clouded by his hallucinations from missing out on his dialysis for weeks at a time, as we are told. Not once does this fact creep into his mind though. It doesn’t creep into our minds either, mostly because we want to believe that what Gary is doing is actually happening. Honestly, I was fully entrenched in this mission and wanted to see Gary succeed, even though I knew it was impossible. Part of me wishes that they would’ve just went through with a Quentin Tarantino-styled ending where they change historic events to serve the purpose of the story, just so I could see Gary happy with Marci and Lizzie in the end, finally being at peace after killing bin Laden. Considering where his mental state is at and what he goes through, it felt like he deserved it. Unfortunately, this isn’t the story they wanted to tell. The idea was to shine a light on this crazy, real-life person and dip out before a conclusion could be reached. This was one major issue with the narrative. Despite the fact that the American government was able to locate and kill Osama, we see that Gary goes along with the theory that they faked the assassination to ease the minds of Americans and that he should go back out to Pakistan to continue his mission, or his “purpose in life” as he calls it.

*I didn’t label this as a spoiler because we know Gary Faulkner didn’t pull off this capture in real life.*

I’m not too sure how the real Gary Faulkner responded to this news of Osama’s death when he first heard of it, but Cage’s Gary responds in a downright heartbreaking way, yelling that it’s all a lie. There are only two instances in which Gary gets away from his eccentric style and gets serious. This ending is one of them, as we see the internal pain he has when he sees the news, especially when Marci refers to the soldiers that killed Osama as heroes. It eats at Gary because he wanted to (or was supposed to) be the one to do it. He thought it was his purpose. Showing Gary’s true issues, he comes up with this cockamamie conspiracy to make sense of his failure. Whether he knows he is doing it for this reason is unknown because we will never know his real problems or “true” self. However, in this situation, it feels as if he did it so he can become important again in the eyes of the public. After all, he did love the media attention once his mission was revealed to everyone. This was the only time where the narrator’s words in the beginning of the movie rang in my head about how Gary is completely sane, technically speaking. Seeing his response to the news looked like a cry for help and a defense mechanism to what has happened. Mentally, he can’t accept the truth, so he creates this idea to go through with his holy purpose. Seeing him almost break shows us why maybe Gary is smarter than we give him credit for…

…or is he? We’re never sure, but to leave on that note is kind of interesting to think about.

It may not be a satisfying ending, but it has to be open-ended considering the circumstances. Coupling this with news clips and interviews of the real Gary Faulkner only adds to the suspicion as well. He’s much calmer and though he doesn’t waiver in his mission statement, it does add fuel to the media-hungry theory that I have. Yes, I may have more questions than answers when walking away from Army of One, but that’s because our subject matter is so captivating.

This film isn’t necessarily accurate about the man’s life, but is it entertaining?

Hell yes!

Along with the aforementioned Cage, Russell Brand playing God was a weird enough choice to work for the tone of the film. I would never think to team him up with Nicolas Cage, but Brand playing the role in the manner he did works, especially considering the new politically-based direction of his comedy in recent years. At first, he’s funny and gets straight to the point with oddball Gary, but when he turns it up a bit with his threats, once he sees Gary is considering dropping the mission entirely, it really adds a lot of layers to both characters. Gary isn’t afraid of anyone, including the CIA, as we see him laugh in their faces later on in the film. However, when God is in his presence, he shutters and is on the verge of tears at a mere statement from him. He is the epitome of the blue collar, America-loving, God-fearing American. We never know if seeing God is a dialysis hallucination or not, but I love some of the added details that wink in this direction. To convince Gary to continue his mission, God says he needs to consider two things: “God and America”. This is all someone like Gary would need to pursue such an impossible task, even with the ever-glaring question of why the omniscient God can’t just tell Gary the exact location of Osama and not just the general area of Pakistan. It’s a question we never get answered, but it’s a vague, religious-like response silly enough to get a pass. With God behind him, Gary believes nothing can stop him. In doing so, he manages to bullshit his way into Pakistan. The scene where he gets his Visa stamped was hilarious. The man asked why in the world he would approve Gary to fly into Pakistan with his outrageous mission. With unshakable confidence, Gary asks,

“Do you believe in God, America, and justice? And doing what’s right?”

Momentarily inspired, the dude stamps it and immediately regrets it.

This is such a fun movie. I can’t stress this enough.

An underrated part of of the film is also the inexplicable relationship between Gary and Marci. How in the hell Gary doesn’t scare off Marci with his ramblings and general weirdness is beyond me, but considering how much of a train wreck Marci’s personal life is, we can see why she doesn’t mind his outside-the-box behavior and idiotic ways. Despite every time he walks out on her to continue his mission, she lets him right back in when he returns. You may wonder, why in the hell does she put up with this? Why does she think Gary is the man to rely on when he just recently tried to fly a broken hang glider (which he passes off as a “lemon” later on) off a cliff, or sail a boat without any prior knowledge of sailing? It’s hard to say, but it seems to me that him putting her on a pedestal in any and every conversation they have is enough for her to know that he means no harm to her, or she has extremely low self-esteem.

Honestly, it’s probably both.

Along with her previously failed relationships being a prime example as to why she is where she’s at, she also questions Gary, suggesting he must have women coming at him left and right. This had to have been in jest, right? Is she really gassing him up that badly, or does she actually believe this bum is a ladies’ man? She’s down bad! There’s no other way to say it. It’s the only logical explanation as to why she keeps letting this man (of all people) back into her life. Even so, you can’t take this shit too seriously because of the ridiculousness of the movie as a whole, but it’s fun to analyze.

He has a “higher calling”. Does she believe in his “purpose”? We never know, but she does accept that this is what he wants to do and that’s love. His “fun uncle” energy is what’s needed around her and Lizzie though, and this is why they tolerate/love him. His energy is infectious. I’ll give them that. When you add in Gary’s easygoing and loving friendship with Lizzie, it seems to be the tipping point for Marci to see if Gary is worth the time. She just wants someone to love her and seeing Gary show his love for her at every turn (even with his mission from God hanging over his head) is very thoughtful. The other scene in which Gary breaks away from his rambling, energetic state, where he talks about his insecurities regarding the way he talks and how he overcompensates for things by talking about his confidence in himself aloud, is so refreshingly honest. Right after he admits how much he loves her, you really attach yourself to the sympathetic nutjob that Gary really is. We don’t realize how much we care for him up until this point but these random scenes that are thrown in where Gary “breaks” stand out, giving us a peak at the real man behind the zany antics. It was great! It wasn’t too far removed from the tone either. It was just enough to show us that there’s much more to Gary Faulkner that meets the eye.

Once again, Cage came to play in this crazy role, and it showed.

Despite the Osama bin Laden lookalike being disappointing and the climax not being what it needed to be, the build that it takes to get there for this under-the-radar comedy was worth it, especially for fans of Nicolas Cage. Seeing the paranoid Gary venturing through Pakistan, going through action that no one with his age or health problems should ever encounter, as the all-seeing eye watches over him, is so much fun. As I said at the beginning, an unhinged Cage is the best Cage, and his role as Gary Faulkner proves this point once again. There’s no way you don’t walk away from this film at least repeating one of his many quotable lines in the movie. Army of One is definitely an imperfect film, but it’s still very entertaining to watch this crazy story unfold.