Harry's Place Arts

I had anticipated being disappointed by Four Lions, and I was, but not in the way I had expected.  I had guessed it might pussyfoot around the anti-woman, anti-kafir, anti-Jew part of jihadism, but it didn’t.  The jihadists mouthed off in that strain, but then these jihadists were bumbling buffoons and so they just sounded like dimwits rather than malevolent bigots.  It was like hearing Frank Spencer singing BNP songs. You wouldn’t believe he really meant it.  So I was disappointed about how unfunny it was, and also how soft.

Four Lions was written by three of the sharpest satirists in the business, Chris Morris, and his co-writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, who wrote Peep Show, which as well as being hilarious is cold and cruel about human egocentricity and self-delusion.  I would have loved it if they had done something like a Peep Show of the would-be Al-Mujahideen.  But instead we were given this comic heist about a band of guys who try to blow things up, and make a different kind of mess from the one they intended.  Some of the audience laughed.  I didn’t.  It was slapstick aimed at twelve year olds.  (I never found Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em funny either.)

The film is a comic thriller with enough suspense to keep you watching for an hour and forty minutes but the tone is odd.   Like the bombers’ bodies at the end  it is all over the place. There were some amusing moments eg when they make martyrdom videos, but that is pretty standard stuff that any competent sketch writer could knock off in an afternoon.  The other amusing bits were the debates about whether someone is a martyr if they kill  themselves by accident, the inventive swearing in Urdu, sub-titled in English, and a scene of a discussion at an ISOC with a panel of Guardian types being interrupted by a rapping jihadist. However the film didn’t build. It was just one pratfall after another.  Only in the final scenes did it approach actual chilling satire when the devout and blameless brother of one of the jihadists is taken off in a container to Egypt for interrogation.

The writers wanted to make these jihadists “human”, and therefore they didn’t base their characters on the repellent 9/11 bomber Mohammad Atta, or give them the self-righteousness of Mohammad Sidique Khan (that pompous dick lecturing and literally finger wagging at us in his video) or the pontificating Osama Bin Laden.  So we got scenes of Omar, (Riz Ahmed) the ringleader at home, a happy family man with his pretty wife telling stories of martyrdom to his cute son.  Riz Ahmed has that cocky mischievous look Robert Carlyle had in The Full Monty and came across as a likable wide-boy. Barry, the white convert (Nigel Lindsay) was a kind of Ross Kemp, and the others were The Thick One and The Showy Off one out on a lads‘ spree.

According to The Independent:-

Four Lions puts a human face on people who are usually simply demonised – a way, ultimately, of not having to deal with them. It makes us care about Omar and his crew of wannabe martyrs, but does not condone their actions or ideology.

You don’t have to “care” about characters in a film to follow their actions with interest.  You don’t “care” for the characters in The Thick of It, for instance.  Is anyone more “human” than the characters in Spinal Tap, who make arses of themselves and haven‘t a lovable bone in their bodies?  They aren’t “demons” but they aren’t rather sweet nitwits either.

The writers did not want to take the piss out of Muslims in general or Islam, which is fair enough, but they did miss a satirical trick of, say, having the martyrs combing through the Qu’ran and the rest of the Islamic scriptures to find justification for blowing up random civilians.

I can see why families of the 7/7 victims don’t like this.  I wouldn’t if I was them, with murderous bombers presented as hapless clowns in a  caper, Laurel and Hardy further confused by ideology.   I suppose you could make a bitter comedy about suicide bombers, but this isn’t it.

Chris Morris’s next project:-  a jolly jape about delightful ditzy pranksters in the Ku Klux Klan, who keep tripping over their robes and setting their mates’ hoods on fire with their flaming crosses, while they mouth off about Barack Obama being a mud person, Jewish and a Muslim as well. Starring Ben Stiller as the Grand Wizard and Reese Witherspoon as his feisty girlfriend.  The well-loved English comic actor Nick Frost has a cameo appearance as Nick Griffin.