Four Lions : What's So Funny About Terrorists?

English satirist Chris Morris creates explosive mischief out of a gang of would-be bombers

By Richard Corliss Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2010
    • Drafthouse Films

    A scene from Four Lions

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    Four Lions , written by Morris and three veterans of The Thick of It (Jesse Armstrong, Sam Bain and Simon Blackwell), applies the kamikaze approach of Morris' TV shows to a quintet of fictional mujahedin . They could be soul brothers to any bunch of not-so-bright movie males, from Mean Streets to The Hangover , who stumble into big trouble — except that this lot has sanctified murder on its mind.

    Faisal (Adeel Akhtar) wants to train crows to be tiny suicide bombers. Waj (Kayvan Novak) shoots off a rifle and calls himself a "Paki Rambo," though he also uses a talking toy "prayer bear" to assist in his daily devotions. Hassan (Arsher Ali), the newest recruit, spouts holy-terror hip-hop. At a college debate on Islam, Hassan pulls open his jacket to reveal what looks like a bomb belt but, when it explodes, sends out only paper streamers in what he means to be performance art — "jihad of the mind." Barry (Nigel Lindsay), the one native Englander, also has the group's most bizarre scheme: radicalizing the local faithful by bombing a mosque. Once, as Omar reminds him, Barry "got on the local news for baking a Twin Towers cake and leaving it in a synagogue on 9/11." When the gang's getaway car breaks down, Barry blames it on "the parts — they're Jewish. Jews invented spark plugs to control global traffic."

    Omar is the brains of the group, pretty much by default, and the film gets much of its humor from the slow burn on his face as his comrades screw up yet again. To his feebler jihadi-cell mates, he must explain the difference between life and the afterlife as going to a Sheffield amusement park: "Life is nothing. It's like being stuck in the queue at Alton Towers. Do you want to be in the queues, or do you want to be on the rides?" But Omar's no genius either. On a training mission in Pakistan (where, at prayer time, the insurgents have trouble figuring out which way Mecca is), he spots a fighter plane overhead, picks up a ground-to-air missile and fires it the wrong way, at a meeting of radical clerics. One of them, we learn at the end, was Osama bin Laden.

    Four Lions has no rational onscreen intermediary — certainly not Omar, who for all his surface plausibility is the most determined suicide bomber. (It's also creepy that his intelligent wife is willing to enable his mission, and that his young son listens raptly to bedtime stories of a heroic bomber dying with a smile on his face.) Stranded without the usual moral compass, the audience is on its own to decide what's funny or awful, or awful funny.

    Because the film puts us solely in the company of Omar and his co-conspirators, it has been accused of humanizing them. But, Morris told Thorn, "The whole point is they're human, and that's ... the thing you have to address. Some of them think they're the good guys. Now how do you deal with that? You have to deal with that rage." As his film makes clear, that rage is reinforced by the jihadis' isolation in the cell of their wild scheming. "Just give me a couple of days with three guys in a room," Morris says. "I could turn us into suicide bombers with nothing more than a bit of aggravation, a bit of grief about something and a copy of The Lion King ."

    In the real world, people like Omar and his gang can't be laughed off because 1) not all of them are idiots and 2) the law of averages suggests that even the dim ones, if enough of them scheme to blow things up, will eventually do some damage. The bloopers could be fatal. Nonetheless, it's Morris' aim to question both the efficiency of homegrown terrorists and the public's sustaining fear of an unlikely threat. The result is the blackest, ballsiest political comedy since Dr. Strangelove . And, for those of strong stomach, one of the funniest.

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