Four Lions

 

Last year’s In the Loop pulled off the unlikely feat of turning the run-up to the Iraq War into a comedy. Now one of the writers in that film’s outer orbit—Morris and Loop’s director, Armando Iannucci, cocreated The Day Today, a parody of British news—takes on the even more outlandish task of making a comedy about would-be jihadists in Britain. Four fundamentalist—but generally assimilated—Muslims goad each other into pulling off a local bombing, but this is a plan easier hatched than executed (and why are they doing it again?). The movie finds caustic hilarity in their arguments over targets and pratfalls with explosives. To hide their communications, the group sends messages on a children’s chat site, Puffin Party.

The cast tosses off one-liners so quickly it would take a second viewing to catch everything; the humor is also tough to render in print because it’s so much a matter of timing and context. Are the filmmakers crossing a line? Although it’s far too lofty a comparison, what Morris attempts here is actually similar to what Ernst Lubitsch did to the Nazis in To Be or Not To Be: deflating fanatics’ delusions of moral superiority by depicting them as fundamentally hapless. It’s a dangerous balancing act—the finale teeters perilously close to the edge of appropriateness, although it’s hard to see how any other ending would have made sense—but Four Lions plays with fire and comes out mostly unsinged.