Review: Four Lions (2010)

[Roger Bell_West]

2010, dir. Chris Morris, Riz Ahmed, Kayvan Novak;
[IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1341167/) /
[allmovie](http://www.allmovie.com/movie/four-lions-v507435)

Four Muslim men from Sheffield aspire to be suicide bombers. Black
comedy ensues.

The film was declared to be "controversial", but unless you're an
all-police-good, all-Muslims-bad _Daily Mail_ reader there's nothing
here to cause offence. These men are _people_ first, jihadis second,
and that's the primary point: terrorists really are just people,
who've made some strange decisions. There's never any examination of
_how_ they became radicalised in the first place, but for several of
them one rather suspects it was simply for the lack of anything else
to do.

> There are real bad times, bruv. Islam is crackin' up. We got women
> talkin' back. We got people playin'... stringed instruments. It's the
> End of Days.

Certainly there's plenty of broad humour here: a "terrorist" video
with a toy AK-47, swallowing SIM cards to avoid being tracked,
planning to blow up a local mosque to radicalise the moderates, and
plenty of explosions. But while that's effective, it's not the really
good stuff here: that comes in the small quiet moments, such as the
leader Omar talking to his young son.

While this most certainly _is_ comedy, it doesn't discard everything
else in the quest for humour. The funny incidents come out of the
characters and their desires and situations, rather than forming the
primary purpose with everything else subordinated to that. Yes, the
would-be jihadis are bumbling and sometimes clownish, but this is a
farce that shades into tragedy, as it should: a short scene in which
Omar says farewell to his wife is genuinely affecting.

You will need to be able to cope with Yorkshire and Pakistani accents
to follow what's going on (the Urdu is subtitled). Highly recommended
if you choose to see the world in more detail than black-and-white.

http://blog.firedrake.org/archive/2015/03/Four_Lions.html