Four Lions

A comedy about a motley crew of wannabe jihadists – it doesn’t sound promising does it? But I’d heard good things about it and besides, it was mostly filmed in Sheffield and I’m always up for a bit of location-spotting. Last night we finally set off to see Chris Morris’ debut feature film, Four Lions [nb link contains spoilers].

It was brilliant. We were laughing within moments, at one point I was laughing so much I cried. The comedy is very much on the black side, but Four Lions has far more in common with the humour of Dad’s Army than the grisly nature of say, Platoon.

We also had huge fun doing some location-spotting [hat tip to Sheffield Blog – and more spoilers via both of those links – including in the trailer!! , even the bits set in London are mostly Sheffield. Some were easy spots (Meersbrook Park is a favourite haunt and I see Kebabish most days on my commute), but others were trickier: we still aren’t entirely certain about our identification of the precipitously steep Jenkin Road and we completely failed to notice that one ‘London’ scene was actually filmed on the roof of the cinema where we were watching it. In fact Chris Morris seems to have featured some of our favourite haunts – how did we fail to spot any filming going on last summer?

Just occasionally, I encounter a film that I already want to see again by the time the final credits roll. I’ve just got to decide whether this one gets a second viewing at the cinema or whether I wait for the DVD.

Photo: Four lions by Sue Langford. Used under Creative Commons Licence.