Once in a blue moon a film comes along which has the power to both completely challenge and flip your preconceptions of a subject,  remaining in your head long after you leave the cinema. Usually these films are lengthy, epic blockbusters involving a re-telling of a historic event, or on the other hand, serious, tense thrillers, anything really apart from a laugh-out-loud comedy about four idiots living in Doncaster. But then that’s the magic of Four Lions.

BY KATHRYN McCANN

www.queensfilmtheatre.com

Four Lions is essentially billed as a funny, thrilling comedy that illuminates modern Jihadism through the prism of farce. Controversial?  Definitely, yet the provocative and original nature of the film only serves to heighten its appeal.  The film does serious damage to your moral compass, sending it haywire as the audience are forced to look behind and beyond the labels of “terrorist” and “suicide bomber” to instead the ridiculousness of humanity itself.  The story illuminates Jihadists as human beings, as exemplified through the close bond between the four men, and especially the protective relationship between ringleader Omar and the dim child-like Waj who brings a prayer teddy bear with him on the trip to Pakistan’s training camp. This ingeniously results in reluctant feelings (shock, horror) of actual sympathy and empathy for the characters as they head to London for their doomed suicide mission.

Although Four Lions is a slow burner, I realised I was witnessing something special around an hour into the film when experiencing at the exact same moment, the very strange paradox of being both horrified,  and saddened by events on screen, yet unable to stop myself from genuinely laughing out loud. Make no doubt about it, director Chris Morris outdoes himself on funny, with dialogue where would be suicide bombers compare how being a Mujahedeen is like being on the ‘rubber dingy rapids’ at Alton towers as opposed to just waiting in the queue.  It is a credit to Morris that the film is successful in portraying slapstick in-your-face humour alongside clever subtleties which make a comment on how society wrongly deals with the threat of terrorism today. The most notable of these subtleties is the distinction between Omar and his more conservative Muslim brother which demonstrates the danger of falsely equating the religion of Islam itself with any sort of fanaticism. Four Lions is not all about humour though, with a beautifully ironic scene at the end portraying the hopelessness of the idealistic notion of martyrdom.

There is no doubt that this film will receive a fair bit of criticism due to its sensitive subject matter. However it will be a tragedy if this criticism overshadows the brilliance of the film itself. Is terrorism funny? Of course it’s not. But this film is not about making a joke out of terrorism, the joke is on the group of endearingly idiotic and clueless men and their relationship and conflict with each other.