When Larry Charles’ “Army of One” was released in 2016, the filmmaker quickky disowned it. Turns out, after severe creative interference from The Weinstein Company, it wasn’t the film Charles intended to make. Now, nearly a decade later, that original cut has surfaced.
Unexpectedly, Charles — best known for “Borat,” “Brüno,” and his work on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” — has uploaded his full, unreleased director’s cut of “Army of One” to YouTube. It runs an hour longer than the version butchered and dumped by The Weinstein Company — the runtime is now 160 minutes. This is not some minor re-edit; it’s a radically different film.
The story behind the studio-released version is now infamous among those who followed the film’s tortured development. Charles shot a daring, surreal satire based on the true story of Gary Faulkner, a Colorado handyman who believed God told him to go to Pakistan and capture Osama bin Laden with a sword. Cage delivered a performance that, as always, leaned into madness — high-pitched voice, manic energy, somewhere between Charles Manson and Elmer Fudd.
But when producers saw the final cut, they panicked. The Weinsteins, hoping for something more marketable, took the film away from Charles during post-production and handed it off to be recut. The result was a tonally neutered, laugh-track-lite version that stripped away much of the religious and political satire in favor of safe, quirky comedy.
Cage’s performance — originally contextualized by Charles’ as dark — came off as jarringly over-the-top in the sanitized final product.
Charles disowned it. He described the released version as a “bastardized” edit, one that fundamentally betrayed the script and the intent. At the time, no one really cared. The movie was barely marketed, sent straight to VOD, and quickly disappeared.
But with this newly surfaced director’s cut — dropped by Charles himself with no fanfare, no press, and no apparent legal concerns — “Army of One” will finally play the way it was meant to.
Will this director’s cut gain traction? Probably not. It’s a decade-old, misremembered oddity finally restored to something resembling its intended form. But in a streaming landscape where lost films and original cuts are finally finding the light of day, this should be noticed.