FOUR LIONS

dMYD
Starring Riz Ahmed
Trailer

Y

Have you read these all the way through? The reviews? You don’t have to of course, and they’re long, a couple of paragraphs at least. It takes time, you could be doing something else, so there’s a big letter to give you the gist, and the name of one of the actors, if you follow films based on a gurning, largely money-hungry ‘personality’. There’s even a trailer, because a moving picture tells eighty-six thousand, two hundred and forty eight words. But this bit, this is just lecturing, it’s sermonizing the blessed and eulogizing the Michael Bay powered atrocity exhibitions that plague your soulless multiplex. (This isn’t a pretentious subconciousness metaphor: Cineworlds are shit.) If you’ve read this far you’re either a trooper, hopelessly sympathetic, or not yet evolved to the state where only whippet-quick images of explosions and tits hold your attention for more than twelve seconds. You’re playing catch up with the world. But don’t worry; the world’s still playing catch up with Chris Morris.
Nobody seems to know how to hold a debate on Islamic extremism, possibly because they’re still blowing our limbs off on a semi-annual basis and generally poking Western Civilization with a long stick laced with nitro-glycerin and faith-fuelled hate. Anyone without genitalia swinging from their forehead knows not to listen to the right-wing fuckjams constantly decrying the whole Muslim world as a vat of Satan, but equally the Liberal Left’s delicate, nuanced and longwinded arguments for actually thinking about things is boring enough to make you want to lodge a spatula into your frontal node. In truth, there are only two people who have worked out how to deal with the problematic issues involved here; Chris Morris, lanky trickster-God creator of The Day Today, and the complex Coloradoan gestalt entity known as TreyParkerMattStone. They’ve done it in a way to beat the stubborns, corner the attention-deficits, and piss off the die-hards. Their solution is to make ‘em laugh.
People pay attention when they’re chuckling. They want to laugh more, so they look, and they listen. Morris’ genius here is to ‘do for suicide bombers what Dad’s Army did for the Nazis’ – making them a ridiculous figure of such baffling stupidity that dimwits across the country can form a kinship with their ideological enemy, sing along to Toploader and generally all be human. Because that’s what everyone is; human, which makes us all fair game for being laughed at long and hard, until our lungs ache and we can taste the tears. Black humour isn’t the universal reaction to being in a terrorist attack, but it’s a damn appealing one. When the concrete’s crumbling around you and logic’s run off down the road it’s a beautiful freedom of everybody to sit back and laugh at everyone; the bombers, the zealots, the politics, the stupidity and emptiness of death, yourself. All you can do is laugh.
Morris has made a career of laughing uncontrollably into the abyss, chucking corks and bits of debris in a futile attempt to plug it up. Anyone expecting the delicate brilliance of Jam or Brasseye is going to be disappointed here; despite the occasion lapses into absurdist ‘clarkey cat’ lingo it remains a fiercely broad form of comedy, utterly different from anything else he’s attempted before barring The I.T Crowd. Stylistically it’s a return to more conventional comedy ala Gervais and Merchant’s soul-stomping shitfest Cemetery Junction, but unlike that drooling sell-out marathon, Morris has chosen to write a long-form sitcom about Jihad, saving it from being worthless by actually having a worth. If humanity stops running in cycles of stupid this may be seen as a game-breaker for the freedom to laugh at anything you want, in much the same way that South Park’s recent Mohammed baiting challenged the frightened rabbits and generally… sort of lost. Maybe they’ll all get shot and dumped in a river in black bags after all, and the world can carry on being serious and scared as it’s always been. Your choice. Oh… the film’s quite funny and the actors are all very good. Sorry.