Four Lions (2010)

Chris Morris spent three years researching Four Lions, interviewing imams, terrorism experts, police officers and ordinary Muslims, and the diligence shows in ways that have nothing to do with a message. The result is a farce about five incompetent jihadists in Sheffield, and it commits the unforgivable sin, by the standards of the current decade, of being funny about its subject without ever pausing to instruct us. The film was made in 2010 and plays like an artifact from a lost civilization, one where a director could stage a suicide bombing as slapstick and trust the audience to draw its own conclusions.

On the matter of casting, the film is quietly exemplary. Riz Ahmed, Kayvan Novak, Adeel Akhtar and Arsher Ali play British Asian Muslims with the specific accents and grievances of Sheffield, and nobody announces this as an achievement. The cultural texture is organic to the story. The satire does carry a genuine racial charge: the epilogue reveals that Omar's innocent brother has been renditioned to a black site, and the police shoot a bystander in a Wookiee costume while deflecting responsibility. This is observation, not sermon. Sofia, Omar's nurse wife, lands a few sharp blows against her sanctimonious brother-in-law, and the film moves on without a thesis.

Elsewhere the cupboard is bare. No environmental lament, no body-positive subplot, no LGBTQ undercurrent, no neurodivergent framing for Waj's gullibility, which the film treats as comedy rather than diagnosis. Faisal's proposal to bomb a Boots because it sells contraceptives is a gag about petty moralism, not a critique of capital. Morris has said he wanted a good-hearted film, not a hate film, and he achieved the rarer thing: a provocation with no lecture attached. We can only admire the restraint. We rarely see it now.