Brutal R-Rated Comedy Turns Warzone Into A Playground For Murphy’s Law 

By Robert Scucci
| Published 19 seconds ago

Have you ever had a day go so epically wrong that the only thing you could do is laugh at your own misfortune and move on with whatever tiny shred of dignity you have left? As a father of young children, I’ve basically described every single day of my life, but I’m talking about first world problems here. My bad days go as follows: mop floor, tell kids not to spill juice on mopped floor, kids spill juice on mopped floor. I then go into the other room and either shadowbox the air, scream into a pillow, or both. It’s the healthy way to deal with mild inconveniences without also making everybody in the room feel bad for making a mistake.

2015’s A Perfect Day is like that in spirit, but so much worse in actuality because it’s about a bunch of humanitarian workers in war-torn Yugoslavia trying to hold themselves together while doing their best to make the world a better place. The problem is that the world they’re currently occupying is packed with landmines, government bureaucracy, and citizens who are so shellshocked over recent events that nobody really gives them a rope to grab onto, literally. A significant portion of this movie actually involves looking for rope so they can complete their disgusting mission of fishing a bloated corpse out of a well.

But the “laugh it off after screaming internally” spirit remains just the same. Sometimes, you have to break a couple eggs to make lemonade, and when life gives you lemons, you find a new God. See what humor does when you experience misfortune? You get sentences like that.

Quite Literally At The End Of Their Rope

A Perfect Day follows veteran humanitarian aid workers Mambrú (Benicio del Toro) and B (Tim Robbins), who are working somewhere in the former Yugoslavia near the end of the Yugoslav Wars. Along with newcomer Sophie (Mélanie Thierry) and their interpreter, Damir (Fedja Štukan), they’re tasked with removing a corpse that has been dumped into a well and contaminated the local water supply.

The job seems straightforward until their rope snaps with the body still dangling above the water, forcing them to head out in search of a replacement. What should be a simple supply run quickly becomes an increasingly complicated ordeal as they navigate a landscape where even the most ordinary decisions can have deadly consequences.

Mambrú and B have been doing this long enough that they’ve developed an almost casual relationship with the danger surrounding them. A dead cow blocking the road isn’t just a dead cow, but a possible warning that somebody wants them to drive around it and onto a landmine. When they encounter a man hanging from a rope, B’s immediate reaction is that they’ve finally found the one thing they’ve been looking for all day.

Mambrú is equally worn down by the job, but neither man has become completely numb to the people caught in the middle of the conflict. This becomes especially clear when they meet Nikola (Eldar Residovic), a young local boy Mambrú takes under his wing while the group’s increasingly ridiculous search for a simple piece of rope continues.

Serious Pockets Of Humanity 

What makes A Perfect Day such a powerhouse film is just how lived-in everything is. Benicio del Toro and Tim Robbins portray characters who have been around the block countless times with their humanitarian efforts, and it’s clear that, as a survival and coping mechanism, they have to look at the sheer mechanics of their situation before getting emotionally invested, leaning into the kind of cynical humor that makes newcomers like Sophie squirm with discomfort.

Sophie, who is clearly traumatized by the bedlam unfolding around her, quickly warms up to their demeanor despite her initial pushback because she realizes that being emotionally detached is the only way to survive such brutal conditions.

I’m mostly impressed by the sense of muscle memory that’s depicted in A Perfect Day. It doesn’t feel like actors playing a part here, but rather actual humanitarian workers who are at their wit’s end and trying to make the best of an impossible situation.

It’s Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory running his printing press effortlessly in a dark, dank apartment. It’s the tired parent walking into a destroyed house after a double shift, avoiding every single spilled Lego while cleaning off the counter and gathering the trash in tandem without any apparent shred of effort because they know the song and dance so well.

A Perfect Day fearlessly shows a brutal side of humanity when war becomes the common language, and those who try to help are tied up with so much bureaucratic red tape that you wonder why they’re even there in the first place. On the other side of the coin, it’s inspiring to see a group of hardened people who genuinely have good hearts and still show up every day even though they know it could get them killed, when they could just as easily stay home and not deal with any of this.

The broken families and ravaged landscape will break your heart, but the banter between Mambrú and B will just as easily heal it when you realize the film’s main message: we’re all human beings, and those who are fortunate and brave enough to try making the world a better place are doing their best to remain positive when their immediate environment doesn’t offer a shred of hope for a brighter future.

A Perfect Day has no right being as funny as it is, but it has some serious pockets of humanity in it, and you owe it to yourself to observe such a raw take on the problems people face in a war zone that will make your first world ones seem so insignificant that you’ll feel like a fool for shadowboxing in your master bedroom that actually has plumbing the next time a minor inconvenience vexes you.

As of this writing, you can stream A Perfect Day for free on Tubi.