Directed by Christopher Morris. Starring Riz Ahmed, Arsher Ali, Nigel Lindsay, Kayvan Novak, Adeel Akhtar, Darren Boyd, Kevin Eldon 15A cert, IFI/Light House/Vue, Dublin, 101 min
Chris Morris's terrorist satire is gutsy without being all that funny, really, writes DONALD CLARKE
AS THE first feature film from Chris Morris bungled its way across the world’s film festivals, the air was alive with the noise of critics and punters straining – aching, striving, busting – to adore the blasted thing.
Fair enough. Over the past 20 years, the reclusive writer and director has developed a deserved reputation as Britain's most astringent satirist. With work such as The Day Today, that penetrating evisceration of TV news, and Brass Eye, the show that got Phil Collins to advocate "Nonce Sense", Morris has demonstrated a singular ability to combine hilarity with nauseous unease. In addition, Armando Iannucci, his collaborator on The Day Today, had just had a famous success with In the Loop. The premise for Four Lionsseemed characteristically transgressive: a knockabout comedy about bumbling Islamicist suicide bombers. Let the Morris dancing begin.
The preceding paragraphs do read like the preamble to the announcement of a raging catastrophe. Four Lionsis not that. If the great man had released the film under a pseudonym (which sounds like something he'd do) it would, no doubt, be hailed as a promising, reasonably amusing debut from a satirist in "the tradition of Chris Morris".
None of which can distract from the fact that – for all the fans' straining, striving and busting – Four Lionsseems overextended, underdeveloped and, worst of all, occasionally a wee bit cosy.
The inspiration for Four Lionsseems to have been the videos released by the perpetrators of the London tube bombings. Despite the unhinged belligerence of their language, the jihadists appeared depressingly normal, notably lacking in exoticism and, most significantly, unmistakably English (or, more precisely, unmistakably northern).
With that in his mind, Morris offers us four vaguely disaffected Muslim extremists from Sheffield.
Barry (Nigel Lindsay), the most bellicose, is, predictably enough, a convert to Islam, and his deranged rants seem like desperate exercises in compensation. Omar (Riz Ahmed) and Waj (Kayvan Novak) demonstrate the courage behind their own convictions by travelling to a terrorist training camp in Pakistan, but rapidly discover that their incompetence exceeds their intemperance. Fessal (Adeel Akhtar), the dumbest of the bunch, disguises himself as a woman by placing a hand over his beard and believes that crows can be trained to deliver explosives.
After a great deal of messing about, the gang decides to blow itself up while mingling with the runners at the London marathon.
The film does deliver more than enough broad comic set-pieces. Omar and Waj’s misadventures with bazookas are absolutely hilarious, even if they could have appeared unaltered in a Norman Wisdom film, and Barry’s incompetent attempts to grapple with Islamic theology showcase Morris’s gift for deflating pomposity.
Sadly, the comic tone and satirical purpose are established within 20 minutes and, with no place else to go, the film settles into a steady, not disagreeable ramble towards a conflagration that is only half as shocking as it should be.
There are certainly unsettling moments in Four Lions: the acquiescence of one bomber's wife is particularly chilling. But, despite its grim subject matter, the film rarely seems properly outrageous. Morris has mentioned Dad's Army as an influence. In that series, however, the Home Guard platoon was not composed entirely of idiots. (Think of crafty Walker, cultured Wilson and canny Fraser.) The equivalent division in this film comprises four versions of Private Pike. They are too buffoonish to fear or pity. They are too unthreatening to stand in for what is still a genuine hazard.
For all that, Morris, working with co-writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, is to be praised for showing some genuine bravery. The standard liberal approach to such material is to balance criticism of Islamicist radicalism with a treatment of the discriminatory conditions that supposedly generate such responses from excluded youth. There’s none of that mollycoddling here. The film allows the police to be incompetent, but focuses almost all its fire on the absurdities of fundamentalism, and of Muslim extremism in particular.
So, Four Lionsexhibits integrity and guts. It's such a shame it's not a little bit funnier.
