Member review

Four Lions is a comedic film about four Muslim extremist and their religious, terrorist views on society. It uses dark humour throughout the film and explicit language. Despite the morbid comedy, I personally found it quite humorous. At times I felt that it was morally wrong to laugh however, I found myself chuckling to the character’s punch lines. The director, Chris Morris, deliberately uses this humour in order to make his audience question the reality of the situations the protagonists put themselves into. The main theme throughout this film is terrorism. Chris Morris deals with this as it is a reoccurring issue within society today. Muslims are often stigmatized as being terrorists, the director takes this idea and creates the film based upon these racial stereotypes. My favourite part of the film is where the young men’s flat mate, Alice (played by Julia Davis) thinks she knows the reason why the men are secret; she accuses them of being gay. This scene is very cleverly written and I found really funny. Morris plays on the idea of homophobic stereotypes as Alice exclaims she is not friends with the young men any more once she finds out they are “gay”. Chris Morris makes this idea seem ridiculous as the young woman looks stupid for not realising the truth. This is what makes this scene funny. I found myself sometimes getting confused with the plot as it wasn’t always clear to me what the characters were taking part in and discussing about. Despite this, I still enjoyed the film. The ending of the film came unexpected as I didn’t think it would end as abruptly as it did. Omar (the leader of the group) is the final one to commit suicide. I personally thought that the ending was anti-climactic. This is because the whole film is based upon planning the attack yet it all goes horribly wrong within a short period of time. Nevertheless, I still thoroughly enjoyed the film. I think that the calm music as the credits were rolling was done deliberately so that the audience could reflect. I reflected back through the film once the credits began and realised how serious this issue is. I also thought about how quickly everything can go wrong when participating in something as dangerous as that, especially when explosives are involved! I wouldn’t recommend this film to my parents or family, however I would recommend it to my friends and anyone who has a dark sense of humour as I believe they may find this enlightening.