Dir. Chris Morris, UK, 2009, 94 minutes

Four Lions

Chris Morris goes for extreme laughs and perilous political incorrectness in Four Lions, a farce about a gang of British Islamic terrorists who can’t bomb straight. Daring and potentially offensive, this hilarious satire may be too biting for its own good.

Four Lions treads on the limits of what distributors and broadcasters might tolerate. Commercial potential should be good in the UK, where Morris is better-known, while a US release may be limited to urban arthouses and cable comedy channels for young audiences – if lawsuits from opponents don’t shelve the film first.  Media attention might help build a public appetite for Four Lions, however, as it seems certain to be labeled anti-Islamic and irresponsible toward the terror threat in the UK.

The “Four Lions” are four would-be jihadists who band together in London to redress mistreatment of Muslims as they plan a decisive bombing to send the world a message. As with most plans by amateurs, these terror gambits go wrong at every turn, culminating in some major blunders.

The farce’s madcap pace has much in common with classic Three Stooges episodes, and with Armando Iannucci’s political satire, In the Loop,  yet Four Lions focuses more on violence, using the rebels’ hare-brained bombing plans for its gags.  The film’s scenes of destruction are some of its funniest – and potentially most controversial.

Proving that terrorists are people too, the cast juggles the testy mix of anger, credulity, dogmatism and incompetence that make failure a foregone conclusion. These wild scenes would be safely and preposterously unimaginable, if recent troubling events in the news did not resemble the satire’s fiction. 

To sign up for Screen’s weekly Reviews Newsletter with all the week’s new releases, international openings and full festival reviews delivered free to your mailbox every Friday, please click HERE

Production Companies

Film4

Wild Bunch

Optimum Releasing

Warp Films

International Sales

Wild Bunch

+33 6 20 36 77 72

Producers

Mark Herbert

Derrin Schlesinger

Screenplay

Chris Morris

Sam Bain

Jesse Armstrong

Simon Blackwell (additional writing)

Cinematography

Lol Crawley

Production design

Dick Lunn

Editor

Billy Sneddon

Main cast

Riz Ahmed

Arsher Ali

Nigel Lindsay

Kayvan Novak

Adeel Akhtar

Benedict Cumberbatch

Julia Davis

Craig Parkinson