"Eh up y'unbelievin' kuffar basterds. I'm goin' turn you all inter baked beans!" - Waj
I find it very concerning that this film was released in 2010 and yet nobody has noded it, especially since it was written and directed by Chris Morris, he of The Day Today, Brass Eye, and Nathan Barley. It is a film about a group of young men from Sheffield who are not exactly bright or competent and who try to take on a task that is frankly beyond them out of frustration. Unfortunately for them, that task is Islamist terrorism.
There's five of them. Yes, that's part of the joke and also a spoiler:
- Omar. The alpha of this five man pride, played by Riz Ahmed, Omar is a security goon at a shopping centre. He has a boring job and a colleague who only ever talks about running. He has a wife and two children, all of whom know of his plans to martyr himself in the name of jihad and are on board with it. Yet he really isn't overtly religious or anything like that, and his knowledge of Islam is present but he doesn't really adhere to it that much. For him it's more a way to put meaning into a meaningless life. He has a brother who is very devout indeed (beard, long robes, refusing to go into rooms where women are) yet totally disapproves of Omar's plans.
- Waj. Omar's cousin, played by Kayvan Novak. He is tall and well built and not very smart. In fact he seems to have a mild learning disability as he struggles to understand things like compass directions and the concept of mortality or why they're doing what they're doing. Omar basically gaslit him into this course of action by explaining that the worldly life is like being in the queue at Alton Towers when he'd rather be in the rides. Or, in Waj's words, "Rubber Dinghy Rapids, bro!" which becomes his stated motivation.
- Feisal. Another one of the Lions, Feisal has a thick beard and is hopelessly confused. He is the bombmaker of the group but seems to have no concept of thinking things through. For instance, he thinks he can evade watchlists by covering his beard and talking in a false accent when buying large amounts of chemicals.
- Barry. Played by Nigel Lindsay. Unlike the others who are all British born Pakistani in origin, Barry is a white convert. He is also from London as evidenced by his accent (all the others are Yorkshire born and bred) and underneath his beard and dishdasha wears camo trousers and bovver boots. He is the most knowledgeable about Islam of the Lions as he is the only one who quotes the Qur'an and Sunnah and is also sociopathically violent and paranoid. It's implied he used to be a racist Neo-Nazi skinhead but converted to Islam over the latter in his mind giving him more scope to get back at Jews and homosexuals.
- Hassan "The Mal" Malik. Joins partway through. The youngest of the Lions. He sees fundamentalist Islam as a way to freak the normies and extemporises Islamist gangsta rap. He joins the pride but doesn't really understand that they are actually going to explode and kill and die in a public place. "We're the Muslimeen and we're making a scene. Now you gonna know what tha boom boom means!"
The Lions are first met filming a martyrdom video in a flat somewhere up north on a battery powered camcorder in which they explain why they will do what they will do. Hence the above quote. And then Omar reveals that he and Waj have got the call to go to the mountains of the North West Frontier to an actual jihadist training camp, leaving Barry and Feisal behind in Sheffield. Because neither Omar nor Waj are all that bright, they manage to get the location of the camp traced by having their mobile phones out and filming themselves cocking about, annoy the actual Al-Qa'eda people running the camp by having a kid's book called "The Camel Who Went To Mecca," pray facing the wrong direction, and then in a fit of overconfidence attempt to shoot down a drone using a Stinger missile which they manage to fire backwards into the rest of the camp. Needless to say, they're sent packing ("A curse on both your dads") and decide that they don't need "Paki Steptoe" to teach them to carry out jihad against the kuffar, and independently come up with a plot to suicide bomb the London Marathon.
It goes about as well as you would expect. And it is pants wettingly funny. And endlessly quotable.
- "Rubber Dinghy Rapids, bro!"
- "Is he a martyr or is he a jalfrezi?"
- "It had a hinge!"
- "This car's got Jewish parts! Jews invented sparkplugs to control world traffic."
- "I've took a photo of me face, and it's defo not me confused face."
- "FUCK MINI BABYBELS!"
Reportedly a number of scenes were taken verbatim from MI5 transcripts of terrorist surveillance, including one where Barry is trying to persuade the rest of the Lions to do a false flag attack on the mosque, because it will radicalise the moderates and cause the greater Ummah to rise up as one, like being in a fight and you punch yourself in your own face to make you "go mental and win." To be fair, given some of the people who were investigated for terrorist plotting during The War On Terror, I can believe this. There's also a certain level of absurdity and surrealism about the whole plan. They meet online in a kids' online game called Puffin Party at one point, and then there's the subplot where Omar tries to explain the concept of jihad and martyrdom to his young children by using Lion King metaphors, which manages to be funny and at the same time desperately sad.
Eventually, the plot comes together. They're going to hide their suicide vests under fancy dress costumes and head down to London for the marathon. By this time there's only four of them left as Feisal managed to explode himself where, post car breakdown, they decided to attempt to transport their volatile and explosive chemicals by running in a very ostentatious and awkward way carrying them in shopping bags because it's fast but smooth, and Feisal trips and lands on a heap in a sheep field and explodes one of them and himself with. They are accosted by a policeman getting ready - "You're gonna die in those suits lads!" "Maybe but it's all for a good cause." - and then The Mal realises after being strapped in what he's dealing with and explains he never wanted this and he has a bomb to the policeman. Omar can't have this so he dials into The Mal's phone and blows him (and the policeman) up, alerting the whole city. The rest of the Lions then split up with Barry in particular disgusted at Omar having taken The Mal's agency away from him and thus denied him paradise and 72 Virginians because martyrdom must be voluntary. He ends up exploding himself when trying to swallow his SIM card from his phone and being Heimlich'd by a passer by.
This leaves Waj and Omar and the whole city on alert looking for suspicious fancy-dressed bombers. After an interlude in which police shoots a man in a Wookiee costume because they were looking for a bear costume (Waj is dressed as the Honey Monster, which they think is a bear) and a whole debate as to whether a Wookiee is a bear (and which is later settled with the wonderfully trollish justification, "the right man was shot, but the wrong man exploded"), Waj is cornered in a kebab shop, and forces the staff to lower the shutters while he holds them hostage, or at least he thinks they are. He's then attempted to be talked down by an inept hostage negotiator (played by Benedict Cumberbatch no less) who confuses him into thinking he's a closet homosexual and causes Waj to blow himself up because "fucking Boy George." This leaves Omar, who resignedly walks into an empty chemist's shop and explodes.
Roll credits, and in a post credits stinger (literally) it's mentioned that the missile Waj and Omar tried to pop a drone with actually hit the tent where the camp's leaders were in conference with Osama Bin Laden and killed him.
Four Lions is wonderful as a film. The most interesting part of it is that it is surprisingly accurate. A lot of Islamist terror plots here in the UK seemed to revolve around one or two true believers like Omar and Barry and a bunch of disaffected people, idiots, or dupes who followed them. It is also accurate that with the exception of Barry, none of them ever seem to be doing anything actually Muslim. You never see them going to a mosque, praying, discussing any aspect of Islamic theology, or similar. It's almost background noise to them. To Omar, it's a way to give his humdrum provincial life meaning, and to Barry it's a vector by which he can engage in ultra-violence. Waj is clearly somewhat learning disabled and gaslit into it including in one scene where Omar explains that the devil is whispering wasawasa into Waj's head and his head and heart have got mixed up. Feisal doesn't really understand reality as a concept and is going along with it for no real reason, and The Mal is just a stupid teenager who thinks he's being big and clever by edgyposting IRL about jihad. The one actually devout Muslim in the film, Omar's brother, despite having repugnant views about the place of women in society and about other aspects of modern society as well, disapproves of everything Omar is planning. A lot of this is also true to life. None of the 9/11 hijackers were overtly religious. Neither were the terrorists who bombed Tube trains on July 7, 2005, nor Richard Reid the shoe bomber, the "bottle bombers" plot of 2008 which led to terror arrests in High Wycombe, nor Pantsman. Even to this day, Islamists seem more interested in Islam as a reason to get their way rather than a religion. The families who picketed en masse and sent death threats and rape threats to the school in Batley for a teacher showing the Jyllands Posten cartoons as part of a debate on freedom of expression were not all that religious; I dare say if you asked them anything about the Qur'an or Sunnah they wouldn't know or care.
The security services don't get off the hook either. At one point we are led to believe that an armed police raid is about to go down on the Lions' hideout, only to find that they're actually raiding his brother's house because they assumed that any jihadist must be overtly religious (and later it is implied that he's going to be extraordinarily rendered to Egypt where something very bad will happen to him.) Also, the Wookiee / Bear confusion as well.
Four Lions is definitely worth seeing. I recommend you do at once. Otherwise "you'll end up on Youtube, blowing Lassie in a ditch!"
(IN24/22)