Brothers in arms

Suicide Bombing may not be a barrel of laughs, especially to Pakistanis who are currently plagued by some of the most combustible jihadis on earth. But that shouldn’t prevent anyone from pointing out the ludicrous and brutal absurdity of violent Islamic extremism. British agent provocateur, Chris Morris, has done exactly that with Four Lions, a comedy about cack-handed would-be terrorists and the moronically monstrous ideology that drives them.

The film toes a strict line between mocking the terrorists and their fundamentalism without straying into any direct criticism of Islam itself, but it is precisely those moments when Morris threatens to overstep that provide the film’s most delicious and mischievous comedy. When the group’s leader, Omar (Riz Ahmed), is confronted by his pious non-violent ‘moderate’ brother who suspects he may be plotting something, Omar tells him he has no right to pass judgment because “you keep your wife in a cupboard”. To which the soft-spoken imam replies, “It’s not a cupboard. It’s just a very small room.” Later on, during a mistaken police raid, the burka-shrouded wife is indeed found in a cupboard.

But such moments are rare and the movie opts for farce much more than subversion and critique to gain its laughs. Jihadis spout buffoonish nonsense about Jewish conspiracies that control everything from global politics to spark plugs, and they undertake Laurel and Hardy style misadventures in the training camps of the Af-Pak border that lead to the unfortunate death of Osama Bin Laden. But while all this slapstick is silly and giggle-inducing enough, it doesn’t satisfy. Morris may be keen not to upset mainstream Muslims, but he’s also unwilling to provide anyone with an excuse for a fatwa. Four Lions maybe foulmouthed and contemptuous of its subjects, but this film is a damp squib.

The British authorities come in for a fair bit of bashing, too, portrayed as idiotic bunglers hopelessly incapable of tackling the problem — shooting the wrong people and making mistakes at every turn. But this feels like a politically correct evening out as Morris seeks not to make any single group bear the exclusive responsibility for the phenomenon. The truth is that the Jihadis are wholly to blame for their backward, savage and nihilistic behaviour. Born, raised, educated and medicated by the British state, such people are still committed to killing their countrymen out of an artificially generated sense of victimhood and a fictitious loyalty to a global ummah. If they wanted to save fellow Muslims, they could work on a clean water project in Bangladesh or for a vaccination scheme in Sudan, improving lives far more effectively than they could ever hope for by blowing themselves up.

The neuroses and paranoia that drives a Jihadi, that indeed all Jihadism is founded on, is never explored by Morris. The complex toxic mixture of personal psychosis and half-formulated political thinking that creates a Jihadi is never laid bare, and so the Islamist nerves that British society so desperately wants to touch — such as their sexual repression and sense of inadequacy — are spared. And by sparing them from the worst of his bilious humour, Morris has made a film that feels like it is cheating its audience rather than giving them a catharsis.

Published in the Express Tribune, June 13^th, 2010.