Four Lions, a British film directed by Chris Morris, is a satire on Islamic jihadism and its murderous ambitions.
In treating the subject as farce, it has stirred some angry reactions in Britain. Inevitably it raises the question: when does satire cease to be funny and become merely tasteless and offensive? Morris’s answer would be: satire must be tasteless and offensive, otherwise it wouldn’t be satire. On the evidence of Four Lions, he has a point.
The film is tasteless and offensive. It will be especially offensive to jihadists. It is also very funny. Morris is a British comedy writer and former DJ. And on the subject of tastelessness he can speak with authority. Among his exploits is a love lyric addressed to British child murderer Myra Hindley and a scurrilously edited version of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s eulogy for princess Diana.
His spoof TV documentaries have ranged across infant mortality, rape and incest.
In view of Morris’s record it’s surprising that Four Lions isn’t more tasteless and offensive than it is. Much of it is gentle, almost affectionate. The characters are portrayed as dimwits and buffoons rather than evil killers.
And it is this, no doubt, that has made Four Lions unacceptable in the eyes of many in Britain. The BBC and Britain’s Channel 4 are said to have turned down the project in the wake of the July 2005 London bombings.
The film is more like a mixture of Dad’s Army and The Goon Show than a study of terrorist insanity. It’s impossible to take our four lions seriously. These are home-grown jihadists, living and working in a British city that some have identified as Sheffield.
Omar (Riz Ahmed), their unofficial leader, spends time in a terrorist training camp in Pakistan. His boys have a lot to learn. They order their supplies of silver nitrate through Amazon and think that swallowing their SIM cards will make their mobile phones untraceable. Their idea of a joke is to bake a “twin towers cake” and leave it in a synagogue.
The most vociferous of the four is Barry (Nigel Lindsay), a convert to Islam and the most the extreme in his views. Barry comes up with a plan to blow up a British mosque and radicalise their fellow Muslims.
Faisal (Adeel Akhtar), the leading crackpot in the bunch, is training crows to be suicide bombers. He buys dozens of bottles of peroxide bleach, all from the same shop, to make explosives. Barry is convinced the purchases will be traced. “It’s all right,” says Faisal, “I kept changing my voice.”
Waj (Kayvan Novak) seems to be the only one with a vaguely troubled conscience. He and Faisal have a scheme for evading CCTV detection by shaking their heads vigorously from side to side to make their faces look blurry on camera.
The film’s best laughs are in the dialogue, which sets a cracking pace. There’s scarcely a moment when the jokes aren’t flowing.
Through all the fun there’s a touching side to Four Lions. Omar is a family man who reads stories to his son, portraying Simba in The Lion King as a martyr to the Islamist cause. When the story reaches its farcical climax in an attack on a London marathon race, security cops are made to look idiots as well. But Morris leaves us in no doubt of the mindlessness and futility of the terrorist cause. I don’t think a reasonable person could take serious offence. But then, I wasn’t on the London Underground in July 2005.