Extremist satire

Veteran English comic Chris Morris has made the leap from small screen to big with his debut feature film. Four Lions refers to a hapless quartet of would-be Islamic terrorists residing in Sheffield. The subject might not immediately strike the average reader as an amusing one, but make no mistake: the film, though definitely of the black variety, is extraordinarily funny.

Morris, a performer known for his penchant for absurdist and provocative comedy, claims he wasn't drawn to the material with the intention of turning the phenomenon of violence and hatred into a joke. Instead, he was slowly taken aback by the astonishing array of Keystone Cops-type mishaps and instances of stupidity that have been recorded in the annals of anti-terrorist surveillance records and other sources. The upshot is that his film is simultaneously well-rehearsed and stranger than fiction.

It's difficult to imagine a militant as flat-out stupid as Nigel Lindsay's Barry, a convert to Islam so dense it's surprising when he manages to piece together the odd intelligible sentence, but Morris claims the majority of his lines were taken verbatim from MI5 surveillance records.

Omar (Riz Ahmed), the group's de-facto leader, is an earnest family man and dedicated activist with little patience for, well, the patience exhibited by comparatively modest co-religionists that he encounters. He's a hopeless militant with no experience whatsoever and a strikingly simplistic and ill-informed worldview, and were it not for the unbelievable ignorance in his midst, he'd be a poor choice as a leader of anything, let alone a complicated terrorist plot. In the land of the blind, as the saying goes, the one-eyed man is king. Unfortunately for his band of bumblers, Omar leads them astray; first, on a disastrous visit to a training camp in Pakistan and finally to a fateful attempt to disrupt the London Marathon.

Omar and Barry are joined in their efforts by Waj (Kayvan Novak as a character so dim he might as well be sniffing glue) and Faisal (Adeel Akhtar), a simp who tries to train crows to be bombers. A last co-conspirator, Hassan, is played by Asher Ali with perhaps a touch too much restraint considering the unceasing antics and energy of his costars.

It's not just the militants who receive Morris' unkind attentions. Police and unsuspecting citizens alike are portrayed as foolish, reckless and guilty of bias, naiveté and worse. But nobody gets it quite as badly as the Islamic fundamentalists in Four Lions. Doubtless, many sober-minded Muslims will be offended by the caricatures of extremists that make up such a small minority of their community, but viewers sensitive to irony will detect a subtle championing of moderation and patience across the board. Morris isn't sending up Islam, after all, he's taking aim at self-righteousness, extremism and violence.

Ahmed and Lindsay are varied and convincing as repeatedly thwarted villains. Perhaps "villains" is the wrong word, because despite their violent objectives and belligerent attitudes, the men are surprisingly sympathetic. They possess a misguided earnestness that shines through all their evil schemes. And, of course, they genuinely believe they are the good guys in the struggle between a godless modernity and a devout past. We can't forgive them, or people like them, when their rigidity and credulity combine in ways that cost other people their lives, but we can at least understand them.

Morris' film is small and humble, despite the iconoclastic nature of its point of view. His writing is excellent. Those unfamiliar with his award-winning short film My Wrongs (2002), his work on the British television series The Day Today and Brass Eye, as well as his comedy specials and radio work, will find in Morris an inventive and incisive wit, a quality that may be just what's needed in an atmosphere choked with religious tensions and conflict.

James Walling can be reached at
jwalling@praguepost.com