Best of the 2010s - 2010 - Four Lions

With the decade ending I thought I’d run a series of retro-reviews in for my favorite new film I saw in each year of the 2010s. The first couple of years of the 2010s I must admit I’d slightly stepped away from film, so there’s a couple of big name films that are probably incredibly important that, for one reason or another, I just didn’t see in that year. But these ones I did. And they’re an interesting mix, and, if you want to diagnose me or my taste or the decade via those, I won’t object.

Anyway, my favourite film of 2010 turned out to be “Four Lions”, Chris Morris’ comedy about four muslim terrorists and the disasters that befall them. I was kinda knocked out by this – by any rational standards this is not a film that should work – the causes and implications of Muslim terrorism are complex, historic and deeply difficult to resolve – but by cutting straight to their humanity, their fallibility, their goofy male bonding – and making their folly an incredibly understandable folly (it’s not that they’re crazy so much as that they’re human), Morris succeeds at making a funny relatable film. And there’s pathos and there’s vast degrees of humanity and a firm understanding that it’s our human folly that will destroy us rather than any some vast unknowable network of evil. It’s a film that does something that should be impossible, and it does it without falling into the traps of sentimentality, or simplifying, or silliness or bitterness or lecturing. It’s inexplicable how this film works except that, somehow, it does. I’d known Chris Morris from his work in the late 90s/early 2000s as a brutal satirist. I didn’t know he could combine that brutal satire with incredible humanity and soul – that the hardest thing about knowing all this is seeing how people end up dying anyway. I was also going to note it’s a pity that the great performers from this haven’t become better known – except that the two leads are Riz Ahmed and Kayvan Novak – the first is pretty damn well known now, and the second has been working pretty constantly in the UK and is now in the US “What We Do in the Shadows” series. So that’s nice.