Four Lions

Writer-director Chris Morris is well known in his native Britain for pushing the boundaries of good taste and blurring the line between raucous comedy and scathing social satire, as he does with Four Lions. The film is a character study of five Muslim friends, would-be suicide bombers living in England. They are all deluded about their prowess as terrorists. Omar (Riz Ahmed) is the leader and the most levelheaded. He struggles for control with the hotheaded Barry (Nigel Lindsay), a convert to Islam whose main motivation is apparently to wreak havoc. These misfits are fully enmeshed in the Western culture they claim to reject, a point driven home when they decide to bomb the London Marathon while dressed as popular cartoon characters. The filmmakers cannily depict law enforcement as equal to these bumbling jihadists in their ineptitude and brutality. It's a great credit to Morris and his cast that they find the humanity in these characters, but Omar, with his supportive wife and son, seems too smart and well-adjusted to be caught up in this madness. Four Lions is undeniably, scabrously funny, and it's certainly a film for our age, but Morris's unwillingness to pin down his protagonist is certain to leave viewers with more questions than answers. Then again, that's probably just he intended.