Special Exhibit: FOUR LIONS

Year: 2010

Duration: 97 minutes

Where to watch: Amazon Prime, Google Play.

Terrorism might seem like a tactless topic even for the darkest of comedies, but please don’t let that scare you away from this outstanding film, or you’ll miss what is in fact a very funny but also seriously mature take on fanaticism.

Four Lions follows a group of British aspiring-jihadists: Omar (the always great Riz Ahmed), who’s the closest thing they have to a competent member; his cousin Waj (Kayvan Novak), who’s just a sweet-natured follower; Faisal (Adeel Akhtar), a stupid man who tries to make bombs with crows and Barry (Nigel Lindsay), a Caucasian who converted to Islam and who tries to compensate by being the most radical of them all.

Not being members of any cell, they have no idea how to operate, or even what will be the target of their attack. They also don’t seem very sure why they should attack anything at all, beyond some mutterings about “the Caliphate”. Waj wants to blow up the Internet. Barry seriously considers that their best option is to kill their own: innocent Muslims at a temple, so that the moderates will radicalize in retaliation… except he still wants to claim authorship of the attack.

Every plan they make is more stupid than the next, yet it’s clear that their idiocy will end with the loss of lives. Which is exactly how stupidity works in real life.

I can’t imagine any rational person getting actually offended by this film: its target is not any religion, but rather the kind of self-deluded thinking that drives many extremists (not only jihadists) to carry terrible deeds in the name of an “ideal” or personal glory. You’ll find yourself laughing at the jokes and pondering the reality behind the absurdness of zealotism.

If the aim of terrorism is to cause fear, clever satires such as this one would take away its power by exposing the ridiculousness of it all. Sadly, as Barry says:

“You can't win an argument just by being right!”