Review of Four Lions (2010) by Sam H — 25 Feb 2011

The windup is long, as I've often found it to be with British humor, but after the slow, spiny first act, Four Lions reveals itself to be a considerable surprise of a film. Most of its novelty is born of the fact that it's actually as controversial as you may have heard - it's not A Serbian Film, thank God, but it has some surprising things to say about religion, dogmatism and ideologues.

It's not an attack against Islam or Muslims, specifically, so much as some of the cultural stereotypes that have germinated around the belief system. If anything, Four Lions attacks belief in general, especially its manifestation in such combative, physically violent extremes.

As presumably rational members of an audience, we have the privilege of being both horrified and amused by what we see; scenes like a father casually discussing his plans with his six year old son to detonate an explosive in the middle of a marathon and kill a bunch of people are nightmarish, funny, and fall juuuuust outside the realm of unbelievable absurdity.

Four Lions is such a controlled presentation of stylized reality that scenes like this, though commonplace, feel part and parcel of a universe that isn't too difficult to accept. In a way, you could take umbrage with its use of humor to sanitize what is still a very sensitive subject for some (terrorist mortality), but in my view it actually takes a pretty mature view of the material.

The ending isn't incredibly graceful, and though the shift in tone could have been more radical a lot of its impact is foregrounded by how attached you get to its characters, which I didn't really.

As a result of all this, I don't feel the satire cuts quite as deep as it could, but Four Lions is nonetheless a fun, off-kilter comedic offering that gathers substantial momentum.