• Post category:Movies
  • Post last modified:October 2, 2021

Four Lions

Four radicalized Muslim men in Sheffield want to become suicide bombers, but their first attempts to wage holy war are painfully clumsy… Chris Morris’s directing debut is a provocative comedy about the perils of Islamic extremism. Provocative, because its depiction of the four men is realistic and meticulously researched, even asking its audience to kind of sympathize with the “straight man”, Omar (Riz Ahmed), in this bumbling group of bombers. That’s a challenge, but this is still a very clever satire that targets not only terrorists but also arch-conservative imams and cops who are too inept to wage a “war on terror”.

2010-Britain. 97 min. Color. Produced by Mark Herbert, Derrin Schlesinger. Directed by Chris Morris. Screenplay: Chris Morris, Jesse Armstrong, Sam Bain, Simon Blackwell. Cast: Riz Ahmed (Omar), Kayvan Novak (Waj), Nigel Lindsay (Barry), Adeel Akhtar, Arsher Ali, Craig Parkinson… Benedict Cumberbatch.

Last word: “It was an attempt to figure it out, to ask, ‘What’s going on with this?’ This [the ‘War on Terror’] is something that’s commanding so much of our lives, shaping so much of our culture, turning this massive political wheel. I was wondering what this new game was all about. But then 7/7 hit that with a fairly large impact, in that we were suddenly seeing all these guys with a Hovis accent. Suddenly you’re not dealing with an amorphous Arab world so much as with British people who have been here quite a long time and who make curry and are a part of the landscape. So you’ve got a double excavation going on.” (Morris, The Guardian)

 

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