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.

I'm no easy viewer and too often do I find myself being bored while watching a movie, or just barely interested.

I wasn't expecting much from this one and after a quick reading of the synopsis, I just thought "say whaat ?". As a reminder you might check again the IMDb summary and try to picture it seriously, you would expect some "sofa talking action" - as a friend would describe movies that have more dialogs than action scenes.

Long story short : that is, without any doubts, the most stupidly funny movie I've seen this year and if you haven't seen it already ... just go (Ok to be honest, I would also put Revenge of the Fallen even if its last year, the level of stupidity is clearly enough for a couple of years).

Whatever you are looking in a movie this one will deliver, it is filled with dumb-touching characters despite their "mission" as terrorists. The acting is not only great as a comedy but just strait out great, any one in the movie have something special and memorable.

Hell, you could even try to get a social commentary out of it but that'd be a long stretch, it's meant to be a comedy with a soul not just the usual "a few scenes funny and forget me next week" kind of movie.

I was really pleased to find this gem completely by chance and hope you will too as this is how comedy films are meant to be.

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.

"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".

The film can be approached from two angles; as a comedy and as an important contemporary cultural text. As a comedy it succeeded beyond expectations. Part of the pleasure surely came from the spectacle of the event; a sold out screening with cast and crew present along with regional cultural references that resonated infectiously with many in the audience, but this can take nothing away from the many levels of comedy at work within this film. There were elements of overacted screwball comedy; there were underplayed facial expressions and reactions that added a wealth of character and personality to the comedy; further still, there were elaborately constructed situational set pieces. All these elements along with explosively dynamic dialogue that was well delivered combined to send the audience into tears of laughter.

In a separate issue to the comedy there was the cultural commentary, which is always going to draw attention when it is such a taboo subject as Jihad: a word that is often avoided at all costs. The film unapologetically offers a plethora of questions around motivation, meaning and justification which it never falls into the trap of giving patronizing, melodramatic answers to nor does it preach any solutions.

The many characters were all utilised to give different points of views and different perspectives; the main protagonist Omar (Riz Ahmed) was fully fleshed out, with the other characters used to offer differing ideas and obviously the above mentioned comic relief. Omar's brother for instance had such a minor part but raises questions around what he considers a true following of Islam, which he promotes as peaceful, but is then exposed as intrinsically sexist due to the way he practically locks his wife in a cupboard. That being said, Islam itself was to a large extent sidelined and the film much more overtly dealt with identification and senses of belonging for a demographic that has partial but not complete grips on the many angles of where its identity is created; this includes Barry (Nigel Lindsay), the Caucasian convert amongst the group.

Four Lions is easily funny enough to reach a very wide audience, where viewers will be left without answers and therefore forced to discuss these issues, which are too often brushed under the proverbial rug.

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