Four Lions

Posted on: 21st May 2010  |

Director: Christopher Morris
Starring: Kayvan Novak, Riz Ahmed, Nigel Lindsay, Benedict Cumberbatch, Preeya Kalidas
UK Release date: 7 May 2010
Certificate: 15 (101 mins)

Four Lions is one of the funniest and most callous of films I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a satirical depiction of a five man terrorist cell in the north of England as they make an attempt to deliver a blow to the Western capitalist hegemony of ‘infidels and sluts’ – firmly in line with Chris Morris’ previous work as court satirist: On the Hour, The Day Today, Brass Eye, Nathan Barley.

If you’ve yet to witness any of Morris’ work then the briefest of trawls through YouTube will bring up several delights. In particular, the episodes of the spoof radio news show On the Hour, with its assaults on everything associated with that genre – from the portentous announcements of breaking news and the vacuity of opinion polls to sloppy production standards intermingled with the latest snazzy sound effects – are joys to listen to, and the humour has hardly aged. Morris is famous for his ability to focus in on an absurdity and to pursue its purported logic to extremes, pillorying any celebrity eager enough for limelight:one spectacular example, from an episode of Brass Eye that had as its focus the hysteria and monster-making of the press when reporting paedophilia, would be a well known London DJ announcing in what he thought was a documentary that ‘Genetically, paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you and me. Now that is scientific fact. There's no real evidence…but it is scientific fact.’ What makes this example so striking is that it’s only one step beyond the kind of thing that newspapers and seemingly serious news shows actually come out with.

It would be wrong to suggest that Four Lions merely satirises terrorists, although that is the main focus (Morris and his production have suggested that one of the theories behind the film was that terrorist cells had similar dynamics to stag parties and groups of football fans). But really it is all humanity that is targeted – the police, the media, the people who live side by side with the would-be suicide bombers. The film treats its characters with the same all-encompassing callousness that the terrorists treat their targets: humanity emerges as a parade of imbeciles and madmen. It’s this complete lack of balance that energises the film, that gives it a manic, set-piece-crammed pace and hilarity. There’s no stopping for back stories, romance, character arcs – just one-liners and farce.

Some of those one-liners ascend to a crazed hilarity. After one of many motivational speeches, during which Barry is riling the troops for their attack on ‘a sex shop, or US embassy, or some other slag initiative’, Waj blurts out ‘Yeah! Fuck Mini Babybel!’ – probably the first time that a wheel-shaped piece of processed cheese has been used as an indicator of Western imperialism. Waj, with his prayer bear, begins the first take of what he hopes will be his post-martyrdom video with the call ‘Ey up y’all unbelieving kaffir bastards’, a weird mixmatch of Yorkshire, hip-hop and radical fundamentalism. The list goes on… ‘We’ve got women talking back…we’ve got people playing stringed instruments’ – Barry, the white overzealous convert has the best of the lines. He’s the domineering know-all of the group who spouts his pub-wisdom on why really they should blow up a Mosque (‘radicalise the moderates, start of the end of days, you know it’), and blames his clapped out car on the ‘Jew-made parts’ that undermine him at every stage. It’s relentless.

The only dissenting note is Sophia, Omar’s wife. Her husband is the straight guy surrounded by four clowns and at first it seems, as in The Infidel, that she is the sensible, down-to-earth wife who will despair of her husband’s silly games. Intelligent, normal and moderate, she’s the only non-farcical character and as such we can’t help but expect from her the usual adornments of a realistic personality: consistency, an understandable motivation. Her calm support of her husband’s suicidal plans (‘you were so much more fun when you trying to blow yourself up, Omar’) don’t feel right: she comes across as the only sane person in England and yet even she’s part of the stupidity.

As with all art that gorges itself on extremes, Four Lions works by not pulling out at the last minute. It feels like something Elizabethan – a play by Ben Jonson maybe, or even earlier, something from Rabelais – where vice and extremity prove fecund grounds for catastrophic attempts at being human. The piece of insight that Waj tries to express just before the attack – his heart is telling him not to do it but his head is saying ‘we’re here, strapped up and so it’d be pathetic to cop out of it now’ – feels true to life, but even this moment of teaching isn’t allowed to break the film’s lurch towards its end. Watch Four Lions: don your thickest skin and laugh your head off.



Nathan Koblintz



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Four Lions Trailer

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