Film and Society

Four Lions: Truth is Even More Retarded Than Fiction

November 08, 2010

Multiple Pages
Four Lions: Truth is Even More Retarded Than Fiction

In WWII and the Cold War, we faced enemies the caliber of Wernher von Braun and Andrei Sakharov. In the War on Terror, however, a strikingly large fraction of Muslim would-be terrorists, such as the recent Underpants Bomber and the Times Square Fizzler, are screwups.

Criminal masterminds turn out to be more common in movies than in real life. Even Osama bin Laden got lucky. A video shows him admitting gleefully that he hadn’t expected the World Trade Center towers to come down. And without George W. Bush’s campaign against airport profiling of Arabs, Mohammed Atta likely wouldn’t have even made it onboard.

Directed by Chris Morris, who is apparently legendary in Britain for his TV satires (I confess to never having heard of him before), Four Lions is a British buddy comedy about five Muslim yobbos in Sheffield peer-pressuring each other into staging a terrorist attack on “unbelieving Kafir slags.” (The quintet is culled to the titular four when Faisal, carrying explosives made from hydrogen peroxide purchased at the corner shop, trips over a sheep. CNN subsequently headlines: “ASIAN MAN’S HEAD FALLS OUT OF TREE.”)

Four Lions’ simpleton terrorists are clearly based on the two cells that attempted multiple bombings in the London Tube in July 2005. Plot tension stems from the audience’s uncertainty over which set is being fictionalized: the incompetents of 7/21/05, whose total casualty count comprised a single asthma attack, or the team that murdered 52 civilians on 7/7?

“Morris seems so impressed with his own bravery that he doesn’t have much to say.”

Four are Pakistani lumpenproles, of whom only Omar has a job. The fifth is Barry, a vociferous middle-aged English hooligan whose conversion to Islam is the latest in a lifetime of bad decisions. (Think John Goodman in The Big Lebowski, but with an imam’s skullcap.) When Omar calls Barry a liability, he sputters, “Bollocks, I’m a liability! I am the Invisible Jihadi!” (In reality, 7/7’s one non-Pakistani bomber was a Jamaican convert.)

Morris got the inspiration for Four Lions while reading about Muslim terrorism’s history in a Very Serious Book that kept devolving into farce: for example, the Yemeni fanatics who piled deadly explosives high in a Suicide Boat which promptly sank. Or the terrorist who made it past a Saudi royal’s security by jamming the explosives up his posterior. When he pushed the button, though, he merely launched himself through the ceiling, leaving the prince unharmed and bemused.

Intrigued, Morris studied MI5 wiretap transcripts of terrorists debating who was cooler: Osama bin Laden or Johnny Depp?

Are they stoners?

No, they’re just stupid.

In his talkative Four Lions, the jihadist chavs constantly offer each other rationalizations for their homicidal plans. But mostly, they just like blowing stuff up.

That, and videotaping each other acting tough. The youngest bloke, Hassan, figures that if this suicide-bombing thing doesn’t work out for him, he’ll try a career in hip-hop. At a seminar on moderate Muslims early in the film, he rhymes, “We are the martyrs/You’re just squashed tomatoes” in his thick Urdu-Yorkshire accent before exploding the canisters on his belt. When they turn out to be confetti-spewing party favors, he’s resentful that the terrified audience had stereotyped him. “What? Just ’cos I’m Muslim, you thought it was real?” Four Lions is like Spinal Tap starring Ali G.

You may be asking, “Yes, but can a comedy about terrorism be funny?”

Leaving aside the obvious moral question, how many high-velocity jokes based on British trash culture can an American audience get? Co-writer Jesse Armstrong also worked on last year’s Parliamentary comedy In the Loop. That film’s bravura dialogue turned out to be a little too much work for Americans to decipher.

It’s not promising that at the showing I attended, the aspiring mogul who had bought Four Lions’ American rights felt compelled to get onstage and apologize that Morris hadn’t let him put subtitles on the English dialogue. The executive then carefully enunciated and elucidated some of the more incomprehensible catchphrases, such as “rubber dinghy rapids.” (In other words, wait for the DVD with its closed captioning.)

The other problem with Four Lions is that Morris seems so impressed with his own bravery that he doesn’t have much to say. He’s especially leery of asking the tough questions that would offend Guardian readers, such as: Why are these Pakistani welfare spongers in England at all?

The answers would be unedifying. The first were imported in the 1960s to work in the mills. (Talk about the high cost of cheap labor.) Since then, they’ve been running “family reunification” immigration scams using arranged marriages between British-born girls and their first cousins in Pakistan. The unsurprising result of all this inbreeding is the high frequency of mental retardation displayed in Four Lions.

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