Fuck Mini Babybels!

Chris Morris, the comedy genius behind shows like Brass Eye and The Day Today, has turned to the cinema with the release of his first feature film, ‘Four Lions.’

But he’s moved on from attacking ridiculous “news” programmes or hypocritical celebrities. For the last four years Morris has been engaged in a huge programme of research to produce what’s probably the world’s first laugh out loud funny comedy about suicide bombers.

Chris Morris on The Day Today

The premise of the film is that a group of young Muslim guys from Northern England are plotting a terrorist attack against the UK. Their problem? They’re totally incompetent. There’s Waj, a none too bright spark who, not quite managing the Qu’ran focuses more on reading ‘The Camel Who Went to Mosque.’ Or Faisal, who plans to attach a bomb to a crow that he’s trained to fly into a building. There’s wannabe rapper Hassan, who, after exploding a fake bomb full of party poppers in a public meeting shouts “Oh what, just because I’m a Muslim you thought it was real.” But the two most interesting characters are the feuding would-be heads of the cell, Barry and Omar.

Barry is clearly a man with a lot of issues. A white convert to Islam, he constantly raves and rants about his desire to bring jihad to British streets. His greatest resentment though is that the others have not recognised him as the natural leader.

Omar on the other hand is a security guard at a shopping mall, where he sits day after day listening to his inane boss drone on about his fitness regime whilst staring at CCTV monitors. He is the heart of the film, and you can’t help but sympathise with him.

When Waj and Omar are eventually summoned to take part in a training camp in Pakistan, they make a total arse of things, culminating in firing a rocket propelled grenade the wrong way and accidentally killing their hosts. When they return to Britain they are unable to face Barry and others and tell them the truth, and so invent a mythical sheikh who has given them orders to attack.

We see their chaotic preparations of explosives, and their inept attempts to film martyrdom videos. The video scenes are some of the funniest, as they try to explain what has motivated them on to their present course. They denounce western consumerism, decrying Britain as a “McDonalds, Disneyland, TK Maxx” land of bullshit, to which Waj enthusiastically responds “Fuck Mini Babybels!”

Barry

In another pivotal scene, Omar tries to convince Waj of the justice of their cause by comparing earthly life to the queues at Alton Towers, and the martyr’s paradise as the rides. From that point on, when Waj is trying to explain what he’s fighting for, he constantly tells people “Rubber dinghy rapids!”

One of the strengths of the film is in fact that it makes little reference to Islam itself. Omar has a devout brother, who in fact tries to argue Omar out of what he’s doing, saying that it’s contrary to Islam. The underlying message seems to be that these terrorists’ motivation has little to do with their religion or some mythical goal of a global caliphate, and everything to do with alienation from the society they live in, particularly represented by Omar’s job. It’s a message that seems all the more credible after reporters discovered that the guy who recently attempted to bomb New York’s Times Square was probably motivated mainly by the impact of the credit crunch on his family, and is more comparable to that guy who flew his plane into a tax office than Osama Bin Laden.

Perhaps this could have been explored further by showing us a little bit more about how Barry came to be one of the group. He’s a self-important nutter who clearly has turned to Islam to give his ridiculous life some meaning, as seen in the scene with the meeting, where he’s on the platform spouting slogans and generally making a lot of noise. (Omar, btw, consistently derides him for this public activity, recognising his need for attention undermines their efforts.) But Barry’s full motivation and background are never explored fully, and he remains a bit of a comedy caricature.

But the exploration of the group’s motives is perhaps the film’s most important achievement. Morris has attended hundreds of trials and demonstrations, and interviewed all kinds of experts from the police to imams. What his film sets out to do is what we also tried to do here on Leftfield when deconstructing Islam4UK: debunk the myth of the massive Islamist conspiracy. The Scottish/English Defence Leagues are the street expression of a political idea perpetrated by a right wing media seeking to bolster the power of the state: that there is a well organised extreme Islamist movement poised to take over Britain and impose Sharia law. Something which is total nonsense.

The fact is that hardcore Islamist political ideas are held by about 4% of the Muslim population in the UK. The idea that they represent some kind of powerful movement is a dangerous lie, used to justify racism against completely innocent people, and to give the state ever growing powers to control our lives and snoop on us.

Morris has attempted to make this stance clear, writing for example to attack vile racist Martin Amis. He’s also talked about how footage of the September 11th planners dicking about on a farm and having a laugh convinced him he had to humanise terrorists, and make us understand they are real people rather than cartoon monsters.

The group prepare to implement their devastating plan

The only part where this falls flat for me is the introduction of Omar’s family. Omar’s wife is an intelligent, modern woman who nevertheless fully supports Omar in his plan, as does his boy. Something about the ease with which they talk about his plans to kill himself made me feel that the message about the realities of Muslim life was being undermined. Not because I think that intelligent people don’t ever think that it’s ok for their families to become suicide bombers – it’s just the lack of seriousness about it, the fact that it’s something that can easily be chatted about over a cup of tea.

However, it should also be pointed out that the film, although it dwells on terrorists, does not leave out the incompetence and thuggery of the state as well. At several points you think the game is up for the gang, only to find out that racist cops have got the wrong folk. In the final sequence, when the film is at its funniest, the remaining members of the group have disguised themselves in silly costumes to cover their bombs as they infiltrate the London marathon. Omar is dressed as the Honey Monster. Police snipers receive an order to shoot a grizzly bear, and promptly take out someone dressed as Chewbacca, leading to an argument on police radio about whether the Honey Monster, or Chewbacca, are bears.

The film has also been compared to Dr Strangelove in that it doesn’t shy away from showing the realities of what’s being discussed. In a similar way to the Kubrick classic, Four Lions tries to make us ask real questions about what’s going on in our society through the medium of farce. There’s no doubt that the realities of imperialism, and terrorism, are horrific, but constant repetition of those horrors has been used to shut down debate and justify some pretty awful things. Just as he’s done with drugs or paedophilia in the past, Chris Morris has successfully used humour to once again break through those barriers, and to see that for every September 11th, there’s a whole lot more Glasgow airports, with terrorists so inept it only took the likes of John Smeaton kicking a burning man in the balls to stop them.