“The laughter died in my throat”, wrote one of the major newspapers and gave Four Lions a pretty bad review in the beginning of this year. It came up in the cinemas quite shortly after the first and hopefully only suicide bomber attack in Sweden. I guess it was a bit of bad timing, not the least since the Swedish bomber seemed to be at about the same skill level as the jihad terrorists in the movie, not managing to blow up anything but himself.
It’s arguably a serious topic, but Morris manages to pull it off. He doesn’t just offer slapstick humor and absurdities in the Monty Python tradition that make at least me laugh; he also puts some serious questions about the nature of extreme Islamic groups and how society deals with those.
The best humor often borders to tragedy, and this is a perfect example of this. As opposed to my countryman I didn’t stop laughing. It was actually one of the funnier movies I’ve seen in quite a while and it was somehow relieving to mock and giggle at the terrorists instead of just fearing them. It’s just a different way of fighting them, with laughter instead of with guns.
Four Lions (Morris,UK, 2010) My rating: 4/5
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