Chris Morris (2010)

In perhaps the film’s best scene, Omar (Riz Ahmed) goes to the hospital where his wife Sophia (Preeya Kalidas) works.  She’s at the reception desk and Omar butts in, pretending to be a work colleague, and tells her, in code, that the moment has come:  he’s about to realise his ambition of becoming a suicide bomber.   We’ve already seen, in their scenes at home together, that Sophia supports Omar in what he wants to do – and this final leave-taking is powerful because the young couple seems to be trying to suppress pride rather than distress.   Other good bits in Four Lions show Omar arguing with his devout, apolitical brother (whom he shoots with a water pistol) and telling his son a bedtime story (‘The Lion King’ with a jihadist twist).  At moments like this, Chris Morris seems to express a genuine bafflement with the mindset of radicalised British Muslims.  He shows it not just as crazily bigoted but as a normal part of the lives of otherwise rational people – the sort of people described repeatedly in the General Election campaign as ‘ordinary, hard-working families’.   Morris makes pointed choices in the jobs he gives Omar and Sophia:  she works for the NHS, as did the would-be bombers of Glasgow airport in 2007; he is – a bit too ironically – a CCTV security guard.

This makes Four Lions sound like a topical social drama but Morris – either because he sees himself as a man of comedy or because he can’t get his head round the jihadist mentality enough to take it seriously – makes only occasional attempts to dramatise the material.  The film seems designed, for the most part, as a satirical comedy and it’s hopeless as such.   Because Morris is notorious for the Brass Eye programmes on drug-taking, paedophilia and so on, the story of four Muslim men, who come down to London from northern England (Sheffield rather than Leeds) with terrorist intentions, might seem right up his street.  But although the basic idea may be shocking the film is offensive chiefly because the comedy and the characterisation of the terrorists are so crass.  (Of course it will likely also be enraging and hurtful to the survivors of the 7/7 bombings and to the bereaved families of those who died but that’s because of the film’s basic premise, not its execution.)  I’ve heard the terrorists compared to The Young Ones, Leo Robson notes the film’s debt to The Ladykillers, and both ideas seem right enough.  What’s striking is that, apart from Omar, all the jihadists – a group of five until one blows himself up in target practice – are ridiculously inept (and Omar is shown sometimes as only relatively less dim than the others).   Morris and his co-writers Jesse Blackwell (one of the authors of In the Loop) and Sam Bain seem to equate a benighted world view with having a very low IQ and no common sense.   Whether at home or abroad (there’s an episode in a terrorist training camp in Pakistan), the young men keep cocking things up spectacularly, arguing stupidly and inarticulately.  Waj, the most feeble-minded of the group, is sensitively played by Kayvan Novak.  Even so, this treatment of the terrorists seems not just insulting but evasive on Morris’s part.  When you watch the video of the 7/7 bomber Shehzad Tanweer’s imprecations against the West, it’s appalling not because he seems thick but because he’s evidently intelligent.

The techniques that Chris Morris used in Brass Eye paved the way for Sacha Baron Cohen’s success in television and cinema.  Now that Baron Cohen has cornered the market of making fools of people by guying them into believing they’re being interviewed with serious intent, Morris clearly had to do something different in this, his first feature film but he seems unsure working outside a faux-documentary framework.  Four Lions doesn’t build:  until the last twenty minutes or so, it feels like a series of variations on the same comedy sketch – and some of the variations are pretty laboured.   When Julia Davis, as an airhead-pothead neighbor, says to the boys, ‘I know what you’re up to’, they may hold their breath but the audience seems to be waiting for ever before she announces, obviously, that she’s sussed out they’re gay.  Morris does, however, still have a talent for spoofing news coverage.  When Faisal (Addel Akhtar) has had his fatal training accident and the others collect his scattered remains in a bin bag, Omar is reasonably startled to catch a 24-hour news programme with the legend ‘Asian man’s head falls out of tree’ running along the bottom of the TV screen.

The ‘lions’ argue about what their pièce de résistance should be.  The most aggressively dense member of the group, a white man called Barry (Nigel Lindsay), argues vainly that they should blow up a mosque because he reckons this will radicalise moderate Muslims.  In the end, they agree to target the London Marathon and disguise themselves in a variety of comedy costumes (the bulk of which obviously makes them a good cache for explosives).  The group is approached by a policeman as they’re getting out of their van and into their outfits.   They tell him they’re running for charity and, when the policeman laughs and tells Hassan (Arsher Ali), who’s squeezed into an upside down clown’s costume, ‘You’ll die in that’, Omar smiles grimly and says, ‘Most likely we will – still, it’s all in a good cause’.   Riz Ahmed, who made a strong impression in Rage, is a talented young actor and he delivers this line perfectly:  it could have been a really good moment if it had emerged from a less slapstick build-up.  From this point onwards, Morris belatedly gets a black comedy rhythm going as each lion achieves his ambition, taking out various innocent people in the process, in a tense, gruesome then-there-were-three-two-one-zero sequence.  But the hurried change of tone and pace makes what’s gone before seem all the more a flippant waste of time.

15 May 2010