Terrorism is no laughing matter. At least that’s how we all seem to feel in the post-9/11 West. But director Christopher Morris obviously begged to differ when he and his crack team of actors made the film Four Lions, a black comedy about possibly the most incompetent Islamic terrorists ever to strap explosives to their bodies in search of Paradise. And he may be on to something, because as you follow their story, you may not want to, but you will laugh. But what’s even more fascinating is you find yourself almost rooting for them in some way--hopefully not because you think their acts are justified, but because you find yourself liking them so much.
Four Lions follows a group of young Muslim men living in the UK, seeking salvation by waging war against the Western non-believers, and going out with a bang (they hope). They have the drive. All they need is a plan, and explosives. Lots of explosives.
Their leader Omar, played by Riz Ahmed, struggles to keep his fellow hopeless mujahideen from messing up their plans of eternal glory with squabbling, recklessness, and general numbskullery. But when him and his halfwit brother Waj, played by Kayvan Novak, go to a training camp in the mountains of Pakistan (it's implied that the camp is run by Al-Qaeda), Omar himself causes a destructive accident that causes more trouble for the terrorist organization than he’s worth. Escaping with their lives, Omar and Waj return to the UK, and without official endorsements from the higher ranks, Omar and the others are forced to make piecemeal efforts at jihad. Meanwhile the loose cannon of the group Barry (Nigel Lindsay) tries to take over the group, recruits a Tupak-quoting jihad-prankster named Hassan, and the oddball Faisal tests explosives by blowing up crows in the English countryside. As their plans finally come together(ish), tensions run high among the group, and slowly one thing after another goes wrong up until the shocking and incredibly poignant climax.
I’ll admit there were times when I couldn’t actually understand what they were saying because they spoke too fast, and with thick English accents. And you definitely want to hear every line, because the script is fast-paced, crass, witty, and solid satiric gold. The characters are extreme, but entirely believable and very likeable. Barry is tough, mean, and his own wild plans for the group take an already bold story into even more morally ambiguous territory. Waj is a complete moron (when they try to figure out what to blow up, he suggests with a straight face, “Internet”); he is easily the most lovable of the characters, always trying to please his brother.
But what I found the most fascinating was Omar’s character, and the contrast between his ambitions for holy war and scenes of him living comfortably in an upper-middle class home with a loving wife and a son. His wife Sofia appears to enjoy a fairly independent and relatively liberal life as a Muslim woman, and her and their son are well aware of Omar’s plans, and seem to fully support him (they find him in several scenes editing his group’s video recordings on his laptop at the breakfast table, like it's a normal thing to do). It challenges the audience to rethink who these people who choose to kill and blow themselves up in the name of God really are. The men who crashed into the Twin Towers were not unlike Omar: highly educated, middle class individuals. But unlike those individuals, what you love most about these characters is how they just can’t get their shit together, and you kind of hope they don’t pull it off, not chiefly because a terrorist act is generally seen as an abominable thing to do--although that does factor into it--but because the actors manage to make them so sympathetic that you kinda want them to, you know, not kill themselves.
You certainly hope they at least don't get caught.
I love it when movies dare to blur those moral boundaries, especially when they do it with humour. Mel Brooks said that one of the greatest weapons we have against tyrants is ridicule. He was referring to his send-ups of Hitler and Nazism in his films of course, but I think it applies here too. When one of the goals of terrorism is to create terror, what better way to undermine it than to laugh? But it goes further than ridiculing the terrorists. It also lets you get to know them, and see their flawed humanity in greater depth. Maybe this movie wouldn’t be able to have been made a decade ago, maybe not even 6 years ago when London faced a major terrorist attack. But it’s still a reality, one people face in the Middle East with much more frequency than they do in the West, so a movie like this is no less relevant.
I found out about this movie a few months ago, just by happening upon its trailer on the Apple website. I knew I had to see it, and eventually Kayla and I stumbled upon it again at a small neighbourhood movie store down the road from us on the new release shelf. It was released in 2010, so this isn’t exactly a timely review of the movie, I realise. But if anybody reading this is as new to it as I was, I strongly recommend it. It is shocking, provocative, very moving and wickedly funny.
To further coax you to see it, here’s the trailer:
Now go watch the whole thing!
-Liam
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