Four Lions

Just watched “Four Lions” a very dark and very funny comedy that finds humor in attempted mass slaughter, accidental assassination, bumbling, badly targeted police raids, illegal rendition of the falsely accused and in general, dumb people doing dumb things with terrible consequences. It is extraordinarily transgressive: Omar, the closest thing to a protagonist, has a beautiful, loving wife who calmly encourages him in his murderous pursuits and a son who adores him and who wants to hear the end of the bedtime story about Simba the Lion King’s jihad.

There is a strong strain of the voyeurism involved in high tech snooping—we see parts of scenes through CTV security camera loops, video from spy drones over Pakistan and greenish tinged footage from police night vision recorders. The lions of the title are British blockheads. Four are of Pakistani heritage while one, the most insanely militant (he wants to bomb a mosque in order to “mobilize the moderates”, is a local guy with a blond beard. Everything they try goes wrong, often hilariously so. There are lots of sight gags, some very broad humor that last through the closing credits and what looks in the subtitles to be creative and entertaining cursing in Urdu. It might be even funnier to those who understand the slang and argot of the post-industrial wasteland of northern England but there are laughs aplenty for everyone.

And there is also shocking violence—not the cinematic eye-ball gouging and blood splattering grand guiginol cruelty that barely has an impact anymore but a more casual brutality that was all the more horrifying. A costumed marathon runner was killed by a sniper who thought his wookie outfit was supposed to be a bear and a man who comes out of a pub to help one of the terrorists who is choking on a swallowed SIM card dies when he triggers the explosive belt worn by the person he is helping. No one who dies does so heroically.

I laughed at the first line in “Four Lions”. It stayed funny throughout even as the body count rose. It is in the viciously satiric artistic/cultural lineage of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”. There is a hilarious bit of physical comedy in a scene with two of the bumbling terrorist wannabes trying to fire a seemingly simple weapon while in a training camp in the mountains of tribal Pakistan. It goes horribly wrong and is very funny when it happens but one of the last lines of the movie turns out to be a completely punch line to the scene.

English actress Preeya Kalidas with whom I hadn’t been familiar before “Four Lions” made a great impression.

A domestic scene with Riz Ahmed who plays her husband Omar, relaxing at the breakfast table before she leaves for work as a nurse in a casualty ward and after encouraging Omar in his quest for jihad:

Reaction to her fundamentalist brother-in-law who comes to their apartment door but won't enter because he can't be in the same room with a woman:

At work as a bureaucratic angel of mercy: