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Four Lions

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    #26
    Four Lions

    Saw this in the week with a Q&A with Morris, Armstong & Bain and Arsher Ali (actor). I then posted some lengthy thoughts without logging in. Here's the shortened version!

    The film is good, but flawed. It's a lot funnier than I thought it would be, although for the most part it's Peep Show style sitcom rather than Morris style surrealism. I also thought its portrayal of terrorism was interesting.

    Spoilers

    The most powerful part of the film for me is the cell's relationship to western culture. From what I've read of 'home-grown' terrorism, it's the people who flirt with our society but somehow feel rejected by it; not the stereotype of a woman-repressing, conservative Muslim. And that's how it is in the film: the terrorists like chicken cottage, Alton Towers and Lion King; the conservative Muslim abhors their violence.

    And then there's Barry, the 'convert'. Someone in the Q&A said they found him a bit one-dimensional, but I thought he was an excellent portrayal of one of those angry, impotent white men: the sort who who could just as easily be a neo-Nazi or football hooligan. He seemed to have no ideology beyond hating Jews (I wonder if he's based on a chap Morris spoke about who was a neo-Nazi and read the Qu'ran in order to give himself some background into what he hated, only to convert himself)

    I didn't think the 'going to Pakistan' section worked particularly well, and I know you have to suspend disbelief for comedy sometimes, but how the hell did Fessal manage to make a 'crow-bomb'* and catch the crow?

    And therein is my main problem with the film: it doesn't need two fall guys (Fessal and Waj), surely? I perhaps see that with Waj the film was trying to highlight how someone seemingly likable and harmless (and probably with learning disabilities) can be easily manipulated to do something appalling (and the "follow your heart/head" confusion is one of the best bits of the film), but I thought Fessal and Waj could perhaps have been combined in one character. And at times I felt like we were being invited to laugh at someone's stupidity (the rabbit/chicken thing).

    The vacuous hispter neighbour is a shit character too: not remotely believable or funny- she'd seemingly been airlifted in from Nathan Barley (which I quite like, but which works better in Hoxton than a random Sheffield suburb).

    I thought the "rubber dinghy rapids" catchphrase was the worst thing about the film though. Not funny, and perhaps a bit racist (I thought people were laughing because it sounded "funny" in a Punjabi accent).

    *Echoes of bomb dogs, perhaps? And as someone pointed out Morris has a thing for crows: there's one in Brass Eye and one in Jam

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