Four Lions

With The Day Today and its more acerbic follow-up Brasseye, supreme satirist Chris Morris made a mockery of the madness of the popular media by saying what he saw. It was funny because it could have been true. With Four Lions, Morris's focus is no longer on the manipulator, but rather the manipulated. Yet by presenting this jihad suicide squad as a group of bumbling misfits, chugging along the road to apotheosis in a car fitted with dodgy "Jewish spark plugs", it's still about the madness – here, the madness of a cracked ideology believed in mostly because it's made up as it goes along.

This is not really a film about Islam, or even religious fundamentalism, but identity. Omar (an excellent Riz Ahmed) speaks fluently about the "Church of McDonald's" and Western imperialism, and yet he's at the centre of a comfortable, suburban, upper working class family unit. Hassan (Arsher Ali) is an awkward, gangly virgin with a bone to pick with his Media Studies teacher. Barry (Nigel Lindsay, who some might remember playing a terrorist of a different creed in HBO's Rome) is white.

For all their misadventures, there's a genuine tenderness and loyalty between these "soldiers". This is a side of Morris we've rarely seen before – an emotional spine that raises the film far above what could have resembled a series of sketches or, worse, a reel of better outtakes. Perhaps this is the film's greatest success: bringing its director out of the satirical shadows and into the comedy spotlight, and proving there's a heart to go with that clever head.

Home grown Asian suicide bombers are not an obvious choice for Comedy. But Director Chris Morris makes a surprisingly good job of it in a work which is skilfully written and performed. The best humour has a ring of truth about it. And so it is true here. The plot moves from satire, to slapstick to straight forwards storytelling, and back, at quite a pace leaving the audience to make its own mind up about whether certain bits are intended to be funny, or just turn out that way. That ambiguity is probably the film's strongest suit.

A strong cast of Jihadists struggle to get a team together, struggle to get to a Training Camp in Pakistan from which they are sent home in disgrace, indeed they struggle to complete any task successfully. Yet they are not portrayed as buffoons. Never before has Muslim culture been lampooned like this, yet Morris shows it in such a way that they are Everyman jokes and should not cause offence to anyone.

The fact that this is low budget works to its advantage. The script and acting win and the documentary style filming gives it an authenticity which is vital for the humour to prosper. Riz Ahmed stars as Chief Jihadist Omar, but Nigel Lindsay steals the show as a Caucasian Muslim convert. Preeya Kalidas has a frustrating, underwritten role as Omar's wife. A nurse, and a mother we never really get her insight into the prospect of her husband, and father of her son, embracing martyrdom, even though she pokes fun at an over zealous cleric when he visits their home.

At 100 minutes, the film ends when it needs to, in dramatic and compelling style and does not out stay its welcome. For some this will not be funny enough, for others it will simply be in poor taste. But we should be proud that this sort of comedy simply could not be made in America, and is the first cinematic attempt to deal with a relatively new, and disturbing, social phenomena.

Like Charlie Chaplin's Hitler, Chris Morris' 'Four Lions' shows that no subject can escape comic scrutiny; humour always seems to find the ability to expose the ridiculous in otherwise appalling situations. This satirical black comedy vents its disgust at the pseudo-morality of suicide bombing, whilst managing to portray its terrorists with an affection that allows the audience an unexpected emotional attachment with these supposed figures of violence.

The film follows a terrorist cell of blundering, inept, and impossibly stupid would-be suicide bombers on their quest towards martyrdom – we follow them failing miserably in a Pakistan training camp, trying to run through sheep fields whilst carrying bags of explosives, attaching bombs to crows, all the time creating a chaotic 'blooper' reel of attempted martyrdom videos. These suicide bombers are not the feared assassins of popular imagination, but absurd and easily led dupes who encourage laughter and ridicule – and significantly, in the end, pity.

The comedy of 'Four Lions' lies in the power of its bathos: the film reduces the dreaded spectre of suicide bombing to a ludicrous pageant of ineptitude. It's a film with fast laughs and dim wit in abundance, an absurd 'How Not-To Guide' to martyrdom.

However, the audience cannot help but feel pity for the characters as their plot reaches its climax. There is a sad inevitability to the group's last moments together; despite the horror of what the bombers are planning, the audience has been lulled into sympathising with their situation. The sadness of the film comes with the audience's realisation that these characters are regular, likable, funny, naive people – they are not monsters in themselves, but made monstrous by their susceptibility to absurd, immoral teachings.

The lead character Omar's interactions with his wife and young son are painful in their twisted depiction of the ideal family unit. At one point Omar (played by Riz Ahmed) tells his son a bedtime story about 'Simba's Jihad'. It is a scene that is touching, funny and uncomfortable all at once, a reflection of our responses to the film as a whole.

'Four Lions' is provocative in its comic parody of an emotional subject, but there is never any sense that it wishes to be deliberately inflammatory. Instead, the story is told with warmth and sharp humour; it offers us a fine concoction of derision and sympathy, pulling at our affections whilst cutting the terrifying down to the clownish.

James Gill ------ Find more reviews, news and previews at www.singleadmission.co.uk

"What are we going to do tonight, Brain?" "Same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world!" Is it wrong of me to compare "Four Lions" to the WB animated series "Pinky and the Brain"? I don't think so. This film is filled with side-splitting laughter and satirical takes on suicide-bombers plotting one ridiculous terrorist attempt after another even more ridiculous terrorist attempt. Clone Pinky two more times, convert the four of them to Muslim extremists and place them in London in today's world, and you've got Omar and his fellow anarchists trying to teach the world a lesson.

Their incompetence is taken to the same extremes as their beliefs. Their possible targets include expletive-described Disney theme parks, their own Mosque, and using such genius methods as strapping a bomb to a crow, or to themselves as they are running around a field. You will laugh until you cry.

Laughs aside, it takes a special kind of film to create four protagonists out of inept suicide-bombers and emotionally connect you. And we haven't even touched the moxie that these filmmakers have to tackle such a subject. Comparisons to "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" and Monty Python are all valid here. Even if this story isn't your style, it's hard not to be impressed with how they pulled off "Four Lions".

In the UK, Chris Morris is famous for the very controversial "Brasseye" series, and he has taken that iconoclastic attitude to the big screen to help create this wonderful little film.

It's a crude yet intelligent satire on a group of young men who want to be martyrs for the Islamic Al-Qaeda in the UK. Rather than portray them as dark shadowy men, they are really just everyday bumblers and naive men. The frightening aspect is that despite the humour, they are aiming to mass murder which always is behind the scenes.

The film uses humour to demystify the self-styled jihadists and take away any sort of menacing notoriety and show them as the frightening bunglers that they are. The fear is when one group actually manages to carry out what they set out to do.

This film is worth watching. You will be rolling with laughter, but you will end the film with many thoughts on the questions raised also. It's simply another great bit of political satire, and I recommend it highly.