Review - Four Lions

Christopher Morris isn’t exactly a stranger to controversy. His red hot satire seems to have upset as many people as it has made laugh. The Daily Mail set were flabbergasted at Brass Eye as they were told it was making light of paedophiles. Actually, it was making fun of Daily Mail readers. His comedy has always veered between disturbing (like Jam) and supremely silly (The Day Today). Four Lions, his first feature film, deals with serious subjects but is actually one of his silliest pieces of work.

The film follows the most useless group of terrorists since the People’s Front of Judea. Omar (the excellent Riz Ahmed) is a young man who wants to make his mark on the world by blowing himself up. After a disasterous stint at a training camp in Pakistan with friend Waj (Kayvan Novak), Omar and his cell decide to go it alone and organise their own attack on London. Unfortunately for Omar, the idiocy of Waj, Barry (Nigel Lindsay), Hassan (Arsher Ali) and Fessal (Adeel Akhtar) complicate matters at every turn.

The earlier Monty Python reference is very apt, as there is something very Pythonesque about the humour here. The characters are extremely stupid, almost to a surreal level. Even Omar, the brains of the outfit, is stupid by definition – he has a nice life in the Britain with a beautiful wife and son, yet he wants to destroy it. This was Morris’s intention, to show how muddled your thinking must be believe being a suicide bomber is a good idea.

I suppose Daily Mail readers will say that the film is making light of terrorism, of showing suicide bombers being nice people. It is true that by using the template of a heist movie, Morris does make the audience (the real target of the bombs) root for the bombers at some points in the film. This is because the characters are engaging and, yes, not wholly evil. However, they aren’t brain washed – they are aware that what they are doing will lead to mass slaughter. The fact that these “normal” people could be capable of this is perhaps more terrifying than portraying them as classic baddies, and certainly more realistic.

This is a truly hilarious film, but the jokes do not detract from how upsetting much of it is or how tragic for all concerned. Morris has pitched the whole thing about as well as you could have hoped for, walking an extremely thin tightrope the whole way. Like his old mucker Armando Iannucci (co-writer of the In the Loop) he is making comedy that gets to the heart of matters.