Four lions

Chris Morris has co-written, acted in and produced some of British TV's most biting satire: The Day Today (1994) and Brass Eye (1997) are classic spoofs of TV news programmes. In 2010, his first full-length feature appeared: Four Lions. The tale of a quartet of bumbling British jihadist wannabe bombers wanted to be a fiercely funny farce, a slapstick comedy that stings.

It's not as black as it could be, mainly because its characters invite comic scorn. Two of the quartet of English-dialect young men are certifiably stupid a la Marx Brothers or Stooges, as shown in their dialogue (but regrettably not in the actors' faces). A third plotter is a mentally disturbed weak bully, a nihilist Caucasian convert to Islam who cannot understand Arabic or Urdu. The fourth is a short natural leader who is portrayed as such a rational, self-aware and admirable Western-style father and husband that he's unbelievable as an eager self-sacrificial martyr-in-chief.

A fifth young rebel joins the group and would add dramatic interest if he were an undercover agent, or anything except a bad-rapping fourth thumb for the handful of amateur revolutionaries. There's great initial promise when the leader and his simpleton pal travel to a Pakistani training camp, with hilarious slapsticky results. The promise is not maintained.

Back on the home front, in Sheffield, the clever leader's smart wife and bright young son are shown to be culturally assimilated and yet, inexplicably, cheerfully supportive of his bombing ambitions, so they're not very credible characters either. Nor are any of the scenario's nicely dim token whites. The movie's comedy depends largely on silly capers, slapstick deaths and occasional black comedy moments involving incompetent policemen.

The gang's accidental assassination of bin Laden, and an expose of UK interrogation techniques (including make-believe Egyptian territory in a container truck), are among various deleted scenes that would have lent an air of contradictory mockumentary seriousness to the movie. It's clear that Morris (and/or his many producers) chickened out of making a snarling spoof, or even a smirky Airplane!, about jihadism.

During the first hour, the plot develops as an amusing inter-cultural comedy of errors and manners featuring a quartet of fools. Then Morris and his three other writers try to transform their offbeat comedy into a more traditional madcap movie pantomime with black moments. That was a comic mission impossible.