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Men In Black 3

It’s not a sequel that needed to be made, but thanks to the charm of its leads and a tone that harks back to the wit and humour of the original, it’s a pretty enjoyable trip.

Bel Ami

The excellent female support cast saves this patchy effort, which is let down by its leading man and a flat screenplay.

The Dictator

A disappointing, often repulsive and mean-spirited mess of a film with seemingly only one real criterion on its agenda: to shock and offend.

The Woman In Black

Packed with atmosphere, this old-fashioned but deftly told ghost story delivers ample chills and thrills.

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Four Lions (Film)

by Mark Demetrius | August 16, 2010 15:41 | Edited August 16, 2010 15:43

While tackling politically sensitive subject manner, this daring satire manages to offer both hilarity and poignancy.

When it comes to edgy and daring satirical subject matter, it would be hard to beat suicide bombers. But the beauty of the new British film Four Lions is that it largely avoids obvious and specific socio-political commentary. This is a comic study of human gullibility, self-delusion, stupidity and the herd instinct. It's often funny, and occasionally eerie and unsettling.
     

The titular lions are young Muslims of evident Pakistani descent, plus a maniacally intense and loudmouthed Caucasian mujahid called Barry (Nigel Lindsay). They're hell bent on achieving martyrdom through terrorism, with Barry favouring the Machiavellian expedient of bombing a mosque "to radicalise the moderates." The grisly premise is a springboard for all manner of hilarious nonsense. There's a rapping suicide tape ("We are the martyrs/You're just smashed tomaters") and a nice line in bizarre (subtitled) Urdu insults. Barry laments the decadence of a modern era in which, "We got women talkin' back ...we got people playin' stringed instruments."

 

As the plot moves from Sheffield to a training camp in Pakistan and then London, the internal small-L politics of the would-be terrorists makes for an intriguing group dynamic. Waj (Kayvan Novak), for example, is the most gormless, and struggles hopelessly to separate the impulses of heart and head, while remaining in awe of the moderately intelligent "Brother" Omar (Riz Ahmed).    
     

Four Lions is perfectly pitched. It achieves the seemingly impossible in getting us to feel a measure of sympathy - though never empathy - for the feckless jihadists, while simultaneously finding their ineptitude laughable and their ruthlessness appalling. It's both a fast-paced absurdist farce and a compelling and poignant drama.