Four Lions: USA Reviews, Commentary, Reactions From American Fans etc

[Revelator]

My apologies if this has been posted elsewhere, it's a review from a pretty good online magazine called Reverse Shot, and as far as I can tell it's pretty recent. (The original can be read at http://www.reverseshot.com/article/four_lions

Feign of Terror
By Julien Allen

Four Lions
Dir. Chris Morris, U.K., Drafthouse Films

One could have been forgiven for flippantly wondering, when George W. Bush announced in November 2001 that any country harboring terrorists would be held accountable, which British city might be first on the list for U.S. air strikes. Manchester, perhaps? Bradford? Birmingham? Nine U.K. citizens in total have been held at Guantanamo Bay, a fact that, with apologies to Michael Winterbottom and his 2006 documentary Road to Guantanamo, was largely overlooked in the U.K. until the suicide-bomb attacks on London by four British Muslims on July 7, 2005. Without name-checking these events, Four Lions clearly takes its inspiration from the 7/7 bombings and emerges as a ruthless and thought-provoking exposure of British jihadism.

The fact that the film also happens to be a full-on, laugh-out-loud comedy will come as no surprise to followers of Chris Morris, who makes his feature debut with Four Lions. Morris spent the Nineties carving out with scalpel precision his position as Britain's most notorious satirical prankster, mercilessly skewering broadcast media and entrapping third-rate celebrities into making bewildering public pronouncements on topics such as drugs, AIDS, and pedophilia, by relying purely on their own vanity and vacuity. Shows such as On the Hour, The Day Today (co-produced with In the Loop director Armando Iannucci) and in particular the acerbic masterpiece Brass Eye marked Morris out as the first in a group of one—the totally uncompromising comedy terrorist—a one man Al Qaeda of the Punk'd/Candid Camera subgenre, who made it his avowed mission to violently strike at the heart of the public's tolerance of institutionalized mediocrity.

With Morris, laughter doesn't come for free. There are as many layers of comedy in Four Lions (satire, slapstick, wordplay) as there are likely to be different audience reactions to the volatility of the material. When the protagonists are introduced, recording a preposterous video message with a miniature AK-47 in someone's sitting room, their leader Omar (Riz Ahmed) emerges as the straight man whilst his three cohorts are, despite their clearly defined personalities and backgrounds, plainly imbeciles. What might strike us first is the bravery of ridiculing terrorists in this way—or otherwise, if one considers that terrorists need no more provocation and would presumably rather be underestimated than feared, there might instead be a sense of unease at the trivialization of human suffering and conflict. As the film progresses and settles, and the laughs flow more freely as a result, considerable further discomfort is still to follow. One thing that characterizes all of Morris's work is its belligerent intellect. He is always an extra step ahead of his audience. Just when you're laughing loudest, he will find a way to make you suddenly regret it—and as you are coming to terms with the seriousness of a developing scenario, he throws in a devastating belly-laugh-inducing gag to knock you off your guard. For instance, in one scene, a hilarious university debate featuring one of the Lions (converted white cleric Barry, superbly played by Nigel Lindsay) as a controversial panelist, is interrupted by an audience member uncovering a belt full of explosives, which he then proceeds to detonate, letting forth a mass of party streamers before beckoning for applause—here Morris shows himself to be as clever a manipulator of his audiences as he is of his prank victims. (Needless to say, the idiot who pulls this stunt—wannabe rapper Hassan, played by Arsher Ali—is immediately signed up to the Lions' cause).

Meanwhile, after a brief sojourn for Omar and his closest protégé, Waj (Kavyan Novak, another TV prankster in real life) at a Mujaheddin training camp in Pakistan (which plays out like a Laurel & Hardyshort—after one more disastrous pratfall, their captain upbraids them both in nonsubtitled Urdu, ending his vein-popping tirade by bellowing "fucking Mr. Beans!" at them), Omar tries to cover up his humiliation by pretending that an Emir has called them to action—they need to find a target and build a bomb.

The scripted comedy routines that follow these four lions (a play on the heraldic Arms of England—the Three Lions—and the jihadist image of the warrior lion) on their quest for paradise will either tickle you or not (there is something to please or offend everyone—at one point all of them even have to pretend to be gay as cover, much to their own fundamentalist disgust). Amongst all the silliness, though, there resides a palpable sense of credibility. This is not just because of the seriousness of the underlying subject matter, but largely because Morris, who researched the film for four years, interviewing young Muslims in Bradford and Manchester (including one converted white Mancunian who was wrongly imprisoned under the Prevention of Terrorism Act) has taken the trouble to gain a genuine insight into the disaffection which is rife in northern Pakistani communities and the many dimly lit paths to radicalism down which Muslim youths are so easily led. On the one hand he witnessed the ghettoization of both white and Pakistani communities in poorer areas, coupled with the visible lowering of standards in social mores amongst whites, brought about by a culture of binge-drinking and looser attitudes to sex; on the other, the rise in influence of radical Muslim clerics after the West's reaction to 9/11 and the outlet provided by jihadism to more confident youths with little prospect of societal advancement in this life (only, perhaps, in the next). Almost none of the jokes, however broad, are gratuitous or lazy—they belong to these characters and their predicament, their religion, their prejudices. As we gradually come to terms with our own laughter, we are slowly being sucked into the four lions' own story. It is noticeable too that it's not just the bombers who are figures of ridicule, but the police and kufr (infidels) as well.

The comedy is nonetheless uneven—some gags hit the spot (Waj asking "Am I God's mistake?") and others are distractingly otiose (Omar seems to be blessed with a unrealistic talent for the overly elaborate insult, precisely like Malcolm Tucker in In the Loop, with which Four Lions tellingly shares two writers). Perhaps the wittiest and most biting aspect of the film is its aesthetic framework, which is as a dead-on spoof of the terribly earnest kitchen sink feel-good Brit film (prototypes: Brassed Off and The Full Monty) in which a group of poor downtrodden outsiders from the North of England painstakingly overcome their doomed predicament to finish in a crowd-pleasing blaze of glory and tears (there's even a car sing-along scene in Four Lions to "Dancing in the Moonlight"). Except in this case of course, they're all suicide bombers.

This delectable tastelessness is felt most vividly in the family sequences as Omar describes his struggle to his eight-year-old son at bedtime by referencing the characters in The Lion King, and later Omar's sweetly supportive wife gives him a solemn pep talk about blowing himself up, just as he is beginning to lose his battle. These sequences, for being played completely straight, constitute the most troubling (and satisfyingly risqué) humor, partly because of the clarity of Morris's intention (outside the taboo-busting), which is to exhort our sympathy for the jihadists. This is not because he has a pro-Islamist agenda, but because he deplores the lack of analysis inherent in taking up an obvious position. These people are not malevolent, they are much more dangerous than that—they are morons. And in their vulnerability and helplessness lies their humanity. By the end, even the clownish Waj, who gets stuck in a kebab shop with explosives strapped to his body, trying to convince all the customers (none of whom are kufr) why they need to die, becomes a tragically loveable fool.

The film is much less about politics than it is about morals—in the audience's case the morality of laughter. Omar's brother, Ahmed, a devout, peaceful student of the Qur'an, tells Omar (in perhaps the film's most po-faced anti-Islamist statement) that "joking is a sign of weakness." Is laughter a moral act? Is it right to "humanize" suicide bombers by making them figures of amusement, in the way Brecht humanized the Nazis in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui? Is it counterproductive or dangerous to trivialize terrorism? Because there is nothing inherently cinematic about Four Lions (like its stable mate In the Loop, it resembles a TV film enlarged to reach a wider audience), and very little politics either, we are left with scores of questions of this kind. It's as if it isn't enough to make us laugh—Morris shows us that an appreciation of our own response to jokes outside our comfort zone might just take us a step or two towards our own enlightenment.

[Revelator]

Here's a rare example of an interesting negative review, posted on critic Jon Lanthier's blog (http://aspiringsellout.com/2011/01/viewing-log-january-2011-week-1/):

FOUR LIONS (2010, Christopher Morris)
I've always felt that, despite the formidable guffaws it provides, the bumbling comedy of The Thick of It/In the Loop represents a new kind of political apathy–"Got Bureaucracy?", this trans-Atlantic franchise seems to ask, cynically convinced that no matter how determined the brainy bleeding hearts of the west intermittently become, they're no match for the stentorian dunces at the top of the legislative heap. Don't get me wrong: We should laugh at our leaders' shortcomings from time to time, especially since learning of the egregious errors that both provoked and then failed to protect us from 9-11. What else can we do? Four Lions, written and directed by Thick of It collaborators, examines incompetence on the other side, following a group of militant British-Muslim sleeper cells through a mishap-laden training in Pakistan and subsequent suicide bombing attempts in England. It's not precisely satire; the surreality of life isn't exposed but speculated upon and made grotesque. Terrorists aren't politicians–when they succumb to stupidity, they don't get re-elected, they simply die, leaving their missions unaccomplished.

In this way Four Lions means to reverse the ontological joke of The Thick of It, implying that the movie is a giddy riff on extremism's inanity rather than a colorfully closer-to-reality-than-you'd-care-to-admit farce; but the sheer fancy of it emasculates the spoofing. (Why couldn't it have been the story of a band of dolts toiling under a genuinely ruthless Jihadist? I mean, aside from the incredibly incendiary potential of such a premise?) It's also simply not that funny, aside from the plump whitey (Nigel Lindsay) who wants to blow up a mosque to mobilize the fundies. There are too many "This is mah Jihad, bro"s, too many physical flubs–so when the filmmakers decide to remind us of the fact that these jokers are toying with life and death, the intrusion of violence has no bubble of comic safety to pop. There are effectively schizoid sequences–"You're going to paradise, brother crow!"–but what starts out as a general observation of the way that terrorism's larger-than-life threats loom surreptitiously about us sours with the urge to give these largely interchangeable characters souls to be redeemed or lost. That the best material (one of the "lions" raps the word "died" as "da-heed") is squandered over the end credits, after the comedy has been made complicated, encapsulates my hesitancy towards the movie's tone. We're only invited to laugh at the supreme buffoonery of violent fundamentalism in theory; as soon as evil thoughts turn to (attempted) evil deeds we must be reminded that these are "real people" to be "pitied".

He later comments:

"When satirists' best efforts can't match the absurdity of life, they've failed."
That's a large part of my issue with FOUR LIONS... The filmmakers can't laugh in the face of TRUE Muslim extremists so they invent clowns who are supposed to be "no better than" and "just as silly as". But as an English prof of mine pondered about Oscar Wilde's only novel, does the aesthete's lifestyle fail Dorian Gray, or vice versa? Are the four lions of the title failed Jihadists, or are they betrayed by their fundamentalism? The movie desperately wants us to believe the latter, but up until the last 20 minutes it's the former that's the prevailing sentiment. None of it is coherent as satire in the traditional sense of the term, imho.

That makes me realize how important it actually was for Morris to keep telling those stories of incompetent real-life jihadis,  since without them he risked getting reactions like that of Lanthier, upon whom a lot of Morris's research seems to be wasted.
Several other of his premises strike me as misplaced as well. Asking for the story "of a band of dolts toiling under a genuinely ruthless Jihadist" is a little too close to what a neoconservative might prefer, and Morris's point is that "ruthless" terrorists can also be silly and stupid. And the "intrusion of physical flubs" serves to heighten suspense, because we know that things can go very very wrong at the drop of a hat, and that helps keep the "bubble of comic safety" tense. I don't really see how the characters are "largely interchangeable"--they all have noticeably varying levels of commitment and intelligence. Lastly, arguing that "as soon as evil thoughts turn to (attempted) evil deeds we must be reminded that these are 'real people' to be 'pitied'" sells short how complicated our attitude to the characters have become--after all, innocent people get killed in the climax.

[Famous Mortimer]

Not strictly a tie-in but a mention of Morris from Cracked, one of America's biggest comedy sites:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-more-satirists-attacked-by-people-who-missed-point/

Lots of Morris fans in the comments.

[Depressed Beyond Tables]

Here's a rare example of an interesting negative review, posted on critic Jon Lanthier's blog

Interesting, if a little clunky. It's quite clear that he's missing one of Morris's main aims which was to humanise the suicide bombers. He wants them bad bastards or clowns, and he's not experienced enough to fully appreciate the fact that the two can sometimes be one.

And so his preconceived prejudice comes down flatly on the 'western' side.

[presta didwicks]

[Bad Ambassador]

Teller is currently appearing the film version of Atlas Shrugged, because he's a mad cunt.

[Old Nehamkin]

Yes, but what does Penn make of all this?

[KLG-7A]

The same, but shoutier.

[Old Nehamkin]

I for one want to hear how David Blaine feels about My Wrongs.

[Notlob]

And Paul Daniels must have some strong opinions on Nathan Barley.

[Borboski]

We're only invited to laugh at the supreme buffoonery of violent fundamentalism in theory; as soon as evil thoughts turn to (attempted) evil deeds we must be reminded that these are "real people" to be "pitied".

I really agree with that - spot on.  Someone up there makes a strange point about Morris' research which this reviewer "doesn't get".  So what?  Robert Fisk does a lot research, he still wrote that amazing article about feeling guily whilst being assaulted and mugged.

Surely you'd recognise that the focus of the satire isn't that ambitious?  These guys are just dickheads; and they're all loveable dickheads.

[Borboski]

Interesting, if a little clunky. It's quite clear that he's missing one of Morris's main aims which was to humanise the suicide bombers. He wants them bad bastards or clowns, and he's not experienced enough to fully appreciate the fact that the two can sometimes be one.

And so his preconceived prejudice comes down flatly on the 'western' side.

He's not "missing" that main aim - he's criticising it.  I wasn't sure that it was intentional, from Morris's embarassing behaviour at that Amis debate it appears to be just where his politics lie.

[0nryo]

I recently saw the interview Morris did with Jimmy Fallon in 2010. He got about three minutes of airtime. A truly bizarre experience:

[gabrielconroy]

I recently saw the interview Morris did with Jimmy Fallon in 2010. He got about three minutes of airtime. A truly bizarre experience:

Have you got a link for that? I can't find it anywhere.

[0nryo]

I accessed it through Graboid but have not uploaded it anywhere due to copyright fears. It is the 2010 episode with Scarlett Johansson.

[Bad Ambassador]

I believe it was on YouTube for at least a while, as I saw it somewhere. Regrettably, CM and SJ do not share the stage.

[0nryo]

It will probably get taken down quickly, but it's worth a shot http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFPQoRIAdv8&feature=youtu.be

[weekender]

Thanks for that.

Strange choice of introduction music "Oh, he's got a film called Four Lions, we need a song with lions in it.  What can we think of?".

[0nryo]

I bet Fallon spent a day on that one.

[El Unicornio, mang]

CBS interview linked from there which I hadn't seen before, not sure if it was posted here previously.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXeWKSYFXYc

[eluc55]

That last one's amusing, seeing how Morris rattles off the boat story, word for word, with almost no enthusiasm whatsoever. It must be so tedious doing that almost every day for 6 months or more.

[Artemis]

Weird seeing him on Fallon, with the interview basically falling flat, let's face it. It's hard to promote a movie like this to a mainstream audience when the only people who'll like it are the people who 'get it'[nb]cringing at myself using that erm, but you know what I mean[/nb]. You can see in Morris's face that the crow clip just isn't really suited out of context for a late night US chat show audience.

Must have been a hell of a tricky film to promote.

[El Unicornio, mang]

Just to add that I've met quite a lot of people in the US who have stumbled upon Four Lions on Netflix and really liked it, think it could build up a cult following here over the years through word-of-mouth although it was never really going to be a big hit