Four Lions is a 2010 British black comedy film. It is the debut feature from director Chris Morris, written by Morris, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong. The film is a Jihad satire following a group of Jihadi Islamist terrorists from Sheffield, England. (From wikipedia)
Morris spent three years researching the project, speaking to terrorism experts, police, the secret service, and imams, as well as ordinary Muslims, and writing the script in 2007. In a separate interview, he asserts that the research predated the 7 July 2005 London Bombings:
"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."(From wikipedia)
My reviews:
It's a terrific moive, There are definitely some laughs in this film. But the most important thing is that the film is an unfunny attempt to examine mindless extremism using humor. This comedy is as black as can be, both silly and sharp.
And this film doesn't try to explore the roots of religious fanaticism and how it can manifest as murder, that's totally wise. Instead, it simply accepts the world as it is and focuses on the ridiculousness of the reality.
FIVE STAR RECOMMENDED.
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