| Four Lions |
 Four Yorkshire-born Muslim men plan a suicide attack on London. Sound familiar? Sound funny? Satirist Chris Morris (The Day Today, Brass Eye) maintains his reputation for controversy in this, his directorial debut. Fifty two commuters died in 7/7 five years ago. Morris commented on the impact of this event: ‘Suddenly you’re not dealing with an amorphous Arab world so much as with British people who have been here quite a long time.’ Morris brings this jarring realisation even closer to home, portraying not just British suicide bombers, but British suicide bombers with whom we can relate. The film’s shabby pride of lions is led by Omar (Riz Ahmed), an ordinary family man from Sheffield. It consists of four mad radicals, whose exploits include recording a martyrdom video holding a toy rifle, attempting to train crows to make suicide attacks and firing a missile launcher backwards. After Omar and his idiot brother Waj (Kayvan Novak) – AKA ‘Bond and Mr. Bean’ – make a tremendous blunder at their terrorist training in Pakistan, the brothers return home and this motley crew hatches its own plot: to blow up the London Marathon. The Lions aren’t the only ones to find themselves embroiled in ridiculous situations. Morris and co-writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain (The Thick of It, Peep Show) use slapstick, ironic one-liners and blatant displays of idiocy to produce laughs at the expense of every character (including the police). This leaves the viewer in a conflicted position. Is it morally right to portray the Mujahideen as imbeciles – to enable us to laugh at and identify with them? When asked if he intended to humanise bombers, Morris explained, ‘It’s an accidental by-product of being able to see people as ridiculous.’ In fact, he advocates films which ‘maintain an understanding for the character that (they’re) ridiculing’. And surely it is not right to utterly vilify or venerate any group of people. This ‘understanding’ also prevents Four Lions from trivialising terrorism. For all its black humour, the film develops a tragic tone. The normality of the Lions reveals the reality of their choice. When confronted by the instinctive doubts of his son and Waj, Omar’s own certainty falters. Suddenly his life’s hope is thrown into question. It is these moments of vulnerability which resonate in one’s memory after the clever quips have faded, and prevent one from dismissing these characters as mere stereotypes, comic, evil or otherwise. Holly Price, Damaris Damaris is an educational charity which seeks to relate Christian faith and popular culture |
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