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 In cinemas now [M]
Director: Chris Morris
Runtime: 101mins.
Four Lions is a sympathetic buddy comedy about a cell of terrorists. You can only imagine that must have been a tough concept to sell to the producers. “It’s a comedy of terrors!” It’s British, because there’s no chance anyone in the US would make a movie like this. It’s the complete opposite of Team America: World Police – Four Lions humanises its suicide bombers, asking us to laugh at their stupidity but also recognise how close it is to our own. Omar (Riz Ahmed), Waj (Kayvan Novak), Barry (Nigel Lindsay), Faisal (Aidal Akhtar) and Hassan (Arsher Ali) aren’t inscrutable hatemongers, but ordinary dudes. They just want to be part of something bigger, to have a purpose in their lives even if it’s setting off bombs for nebulous reasons they don’t entirely understand. If you noticed there are five names when there’s a four in the title then well done you. It makes sense once you’ve seen the movie, or its spoiler-ific trailer.
The best gags in Four Lions come from the absurdity of the situations. Omar has a wife and son who take part in heart-warming scenes straight out of any movie where the supportive family stand by Daddy, made darkly humorous by the fact they’re encouraging him to blow himself up. Barry, the white convert to Islam, is the most vocal of the bunch and has a daft plan to bomb a mosque to radicalise moderate Muslims. Omar’s brother, who is much more devout, abhors violence and gets upset by water pistols. Most of the movie is just about the jihadists bickering, however, going around in circles while having conversations that illustrate how mundane they are but don’t add many laughs.
It’s similar to In The Loop in a lot of ways, which makes sense since it was co-written by one of that movie’s writers (Jesse Armstrong of Peep Show), and In The Loop’s director, Armando Iannucci, has collaborated with Chris Morris in the past. Both movies are very, very British and both exploit the same kind of dialogue-driven character humour. Four Lions and In The Loop take us behind the scenes to show that the ineptness of typical people is as common among politicians or jihadists as anybody. With In The Loop, however, seeing policy-makers believably portrayed as fools is frightening. By making terrorists into ineffectual idiots rather than dangerous idiots Four Lions is oddly comforting. These bumbling bombers are mostly just a danger to themselves, and there’s less satirical bite in Four Lions because of it.
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JODY MACGREGOR
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