Four Lions
2010
***
Director: Chris Morris
Cast: Riz Ahmed, Kayvan Novak, Nigel Lindsay, Arsher Ali, Adeel Akhtar
Is there a subject matter which is too taboo to make fun of? Probably not. For example, Dr. Strangelove made us laugh at nuclear war, and Life Is Beautiful explored Holocaust with humour. Mere nine years after 9/11, Chris Morris uses islamic extremism as a source material for his black comedy. The story follows a group of young British muslim men who want to become suicide bombers. After a disastrous trip to an Al Qaida training camp in Pakistan, these four dimwits pursue their cause alone and attempt to agree on a target. When you deal with a topic like this, the balance between the funny and the tragic must be just right. For the most part, Morris gets it right, although his film loses much of its poignancy by portraying the terrorists as complete idiots. In the last fifteen minutes, however, I found my smiles and laughs getting increasingly laboured.
