By Having cemented his reputation as the bête noire of British television with a no-taboo-too-big approach to comedy that culminated in the ‘paedophile special’ of Brass Eye, it won’t come as a surprise to many Chris Morris fans that his move to the big-screen is similarly keen to run head first into the most prescient controversy of the time and poke it with a big stick. Four Lions is a comedy about suicide bombers.
Having cemented his reputation as the bête noire of British television with a no-taboo-too-big approach to comedy that culminated in the 'paedophile special' of Brass Eye, it won't come as a surprise to many Chris Morris fans that his move to the big-screen is similarly keen to run head first into the most prescient controversy of the time and poke it with a big stick. Four Lions is a comedy about suicide bombers.{{page_break}}
For all his notoriety, it would be far from correct to label Morris as a comedy ambulance chaser. His work has never been about picking a controversy and exploiting it, but rather dissecting the roles played by society and media in bringing attention to and sensationalising these taboos. There are no attempts in Four Lions to make fun of the act of suicide bombing or its consequences. The overriding joke of the film is that while the impression we are given of Al Qaeda and Islamic extremism is of a merciless danger lurking within our midst, the majority of suicide bombers are acting on their own and following a path of extremism because they haven't the intelligence to make anything better of their lives. Even those at the top of the movement are represented less as diabolical masterminds than cowards who spend most of their time in hiding and resorting to recruiting any deluded sap who has saved up for a plane ticket to Pakistan.
The aimlessness of the four aspiring martyrs led by Omar, a man divided between devotion to his family and determination to follow through his extremist beliefs, may be key to the satire, but makes the film difficult to engage with as anything other than a series of sketches. With Brass Eye, Morris could lay his jokes on the foundation of a television news format both familiar, giving an underlying humour to seeing its pomposities exaggerated, and which presents its stories to viewers in a naturally segmented format. The sketch-based nature of the humour did not affect the cohesion of the programme as a satire because we watch the news as a series of unrelated stories.
While Morris shoots the film in a style that mimics hand-held cameras (thankfully not overdoing the shaking), there's little to link its characters' digressions together. All we are given is a series of comic scenarios, held together only by the presence of recurring characters rather than a progressing narrative. While these scenarios have plenty of potential for comedy in their own right, the absence of a strong central storyline makes it seem as though the writers were themselves unsure about the point they were trying to make.
In the final act, when Morris tries to drive home the impact of what his characters are doing, the switch in tone feels out of place and the sensation hollow because there has been no sense of them building up to that important point. Because the story is so divided, none of what we see at the end carries any dramatic weight. By structuring his film as a series of individual segments, Morris loses the power of his final moments because viewers have only up until that point experienced his story as a succession of build-up and punchline situations, leaving any real-world consequences as an afterthought.
The film's humour is similarly disjointed: where most great cinematic comedies start with a handful of simple gags and escalate them, using one-time gags to keep the laughter from dying out in between the big set-pieces, Four Lions throws lines and scenes at its audience with no intention of putting them in any bigger comedic context or making any more of them than in those isolated moments. The one time the film does develop an earlier joke, revealing a wider consequence of an early mishap with a rocket launcher, it earns one of the biggest laughs – a shame that it only arrives during the end credits.
That's not to say the film doesn't have its funny moments, but few are more than quick chuckles and neither Morris or his writers seem aware of the importance of maintaining a sense of levity in his audience. Here you laugh, then stop and wait for the next joke, with scenes inserted in-between that remind us of the seriousness of martyrdom and turn the light tone to lead. Omar rewriting The Lion King to impart his son with an understanding of the suicide bomber ideology might have been meaningful and ominously moving in a drama, but falls flat in a comedy where the same points could have been made through satire without sacrificing humour. Morris's flair for silliness fights an uphill battle to keep the film alive and his lack of awareness towards overcoming the differences between television and cinematic comedy diffuse the huge potential before it's given an opportunity to go off.
Overall Score: 5.20 – Bad. (5s are movies that either failed at reaching the goals it set out to do, or didn’t set out to do anything special and still had many flaws. Some will enjoy 5s, but unless you’re a fan of this genre, you shouldn’t see it, and might not even want to rent it.)
Glenn Morris:
Overall Score: 4.65 — If you absolutely love every moment in every episode of every television show mentioned in my review, and just can’t live without more of the same, then Four Lions might be exactly what you want, but like The Office you should be watching it on Hulu with limited commercial interruption, not making a night of it plus popcorn. You can read his full review here!