Chris Morris, once described as “the Orson Welles of British comedy”, is reliably fearless and brilliant.
Now he has made his debut feature, a satirical black comedy about Islamic suicide bombers.
Crucially, it focuses his sacrilegious energy not at all at the tenets of Islam (what could be more tiresome or irrelevant?) but simply at the activity of suicide bombing itself.
It is not treated with the cowed, shocked respect habitually to be found in drama or on the news, but rather with cheerful scorn.
This is a film in which suicide bombers are not martyr-warriors, or powerful enemies to be hated and feared, but ridiculous bunglers.
In the tradition of Charlie Chaplin sending up Hitler, Morris depicts a movement of violent berks and prats.
In this film, everyone is stupid. The suicide bombers are stupid, the coppers are stupid; even the clever suicide bomber with the gentle, loving marriage and adoring son is stupid: he is the most culpably stupid of all.
And this never looks like a cop-out or a moral equivalence of stupidity, but the comic enactment of a generally degraded and absurd culture of paranoid futility.
Omar (Riz Ahmed) is a jihadist with a wife and child who yearns to be chosen for a suicide mission.
But his like-minded comrades are dopes. His brother Waj (Kayvan Novak) is an unspeakable klutz.
A white zealot-convert called Barry (Nigel Lindsay) is a blowhard and egomaniac. Dim-bulb Faisal (Adeel Akhtar) is training crows to fly around with bombs strapped to them and Hassan (Arsher Ali) is a rapper-terrorist-wannabe who disrupts a public meeting by pretending to be a suicide bomber, only with party poppers instead of explosives: “It’s the gesture/ That messed ya!” he gloats.
These are people who incessantly screw up their martyrdom videos, to which they of course attach enormous importance, and Omar — glumly reviewing the results on his laptop — describes them as the “blooper” outtakes, as though compiling a DVD deleted-scenes feature.
After a catastrophic visit to a training camp in Pakistan, where they succeed in disgracing themselves utterly, Omar and Waj return gloomily to find that loose-cannon Barry has presumed to make recruitments without clearing it with anyone else. So, to reassert his authority, Omar initiates his own plan: they will blow themselves up at the London Marathon, where their silly novelty costumes will conceal the explosives; no one will search them and it will all happen on live television.
The most uncomfortable aspect of Four Lions is the excruciatingly happy, healthy, fulfilled home life of Omar.
Just as we have become accustomed to the idea that only idiots or creeps want to kill people by blowing themselves up, Morris coolly presents us with a self-evidently nice, commonsensical guy who loves his family, and whose irritation with religious pedantry is supremely sympathetic.
And yet Omar — the cool one, the smart one — wants what all the idiots want. He is essentially no different from them and his wife never questions it or tries to talk him out of it; there is no serious discussion of justification, of the West’s mendacious war in Iraq, and there is no earnest debate of the elaborately written kind that would take up a good 10 minutes of a more serious type of film — the kind, in fact, that dominated a central section of Steve McQueen’s Hunger, about the Irish republican suicide hunger-strikers.
Part of the deliberate black-comic effect of Four Lions is the withholding of this kind of debate.
Four Lions is of course fundamentally different from suicide-bombing films such as Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2006), Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now (2005) or Santosh Sivan’s The Terrorist (1999), although there are in fact cautious jokes in Paradise Now about martyrdom videos.
They all assume, on some level, that respect has to be paid to suicide bombing, and that the appropriate genre cannot conceivably be comedy.
Morris does not make that assumption. His film is brutally unimpressed with the moral idiocy of suicide bombing and suggests that the only sane response is derisive laughter.
His co-writers are the brightest and best: Jesse Armstrong, Sam Bain and Simon Blackwell, but my only tiny reservation about Four Lions is that, funny though it always is, there is perhaps not the same level of relentless, sulphurous verbal invention and brutal gags that we saw in, say, The Thick of It or In the Loop. But the laughs and the gloriously incorrect commonsense detonate all the same. —