Four Lions surprised me several times, in several ways. And in the most profound and effective way, it used the very formulas that create the desire to do so.
It unfolds as a classical self determination comedy, which sounds like a concern but serves a beautiful purpose. It wants you to fall into the comfortable pattern of such things, ensnare you with the familiar and have you root for the plucky protagonists in their endeavour. It just so happens that their particular task, rather than being to run a marathon or get a girl, is to murder a whole bunch of people.
And it's so subtle and warm and disarming that when it questions the act, and as a result your compliance, it's genuinely shocking. It attempts, and in my case at least, succeeds in building dissonance, in handing you opposing views in order that you question them both. It is in short, satire at it's finest. I find myself reaching for adjectives such as honed and meticulous.
With such a wonderfully sculpted work I could easily forget to mention that it is just outrageously funny. Which would be a huge disservice. Driven by perfectly crafted characters, it strides the gulf between deeply cutting and outright silly like a positive Adonis, and remains quotable throughout.
Rubber dinghy rapids, bro.
I liked it. But outrageously funny? No not at all unless you are REALLY trying to make yourself finding it funny.
ReplyDeleteIt's just amusing.. with some laugh out loud moments of true hilarity but far and few between.
I sat with a smile through most of it.. and the occasional 'heh'. But i cannot say it had me in fits of giggles. It's not meant to either.. if it was that funny, it would lose its poignancy and impact. It's important not to find it too funny because it is also got its feet firmly rooted within tragedy.
Interestingly the line between tragedy and comedy is very blurred. Placing tragic characters in a comedy setting.. or doing comedy in a tragic setting.. only a few have achieved such level of skill in writing and one of them is called Shakespeare who essentially invented and developed the medium.
It borrows much from some of the great british comedies that use such settings.. there are elements of Porridge, Dad's Army and Only Fools and Horses in this and as such it becomes a pleasure to watch.
This is perfect because it means the film is quintessentially English in its comedy, its setting, its pace and its narrative. As such it shows a level of mastery of the form above and beyond the events of the film itself.. its just such a shame that these elements are just too subtle to comprehend on a pure entertainment level.
There are a whole host of moments in there that make me crack up just to think about. I'm sitting here grinning at the thought of the security camera evasion technique, Waj taking a photo to work out if he's confused and the police snipers attempting to establish if The Honey Monster is a bear.
ReplyDeleteI mentioned elsewhere that rating comedy is always a fiddly business, and as I'm a fairly sizable fan of Chris Morris, maybe that should read "I found it". It's not quite up there with gag-laden fare like Airplane and Blazing Saddles, but it's in that general direction.
And I don't think it did lose poignancy, I think much of it's aim was the juxtaposition; To make your brain go "should you be laughing at this?" And maybe that's a tightrope it walks. I can see that in certain frames of mind I might not have been, but happily I found it worked in both ways.