FOUR LIONS (2010) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Christopher Morris
Kayvan Novak, Nigel Lindsay, Riz Achmed,
Adeel Akhtar, Preena Kalidas, Mohammad Aquil
A British black comedy about a small band of self-styled jihadis who decide to become suicide bombers. First they have to assemble the means to make the bombs (they need lots of bleach), and then there's the matter of deciding what, besides themselves, they want to blow up. (Possible targets include a pharmacy, the Internet, a mosque and the London Marathon.) So, okay, these aren't the brightest amateur terrorists on the block, a liability that's only slightly offset by the fact that they're completely delusional. You've got to admire a movie that would take on terrorism as a subject for comedy in the first place. But you've really got to admire one that would take a premise like this to its logical conclusion, which this film does. I saw it in a small theater with about ten other people, half of them watching in stony silence and the other half laughing hysterically. Me, I was one of the ones laughing. When a trainee in a terrorist camp in Pakistan tries to fire a rocket at an American drone and accidentally kills Osama Bin Laden instead, what's not funny about that?
