Prospect recommends: Four Lions

Films about Islamic terrorism have tended to assume a tone of high seriousness, whether they explore lapses in judicial process (The Road To Guantanamo, Rendition) or personal motivation (the television drama The Hamburg Cell), and their reach has been niche. Men behaving like idiots, on the other hand, is a reliably popular topic, as the $462m (£298m) worldwide box office takings for the stag-night film The Hangover attests.

It takes a special person to fuse these genres, and that man is Chris Morris, who demonstrated a keen eye for the idiocy of modern life in iconic television comedies The Day Today and Brass Eye. Three years of research into jihadist networks led him to conclude: “Terrorist cells have the same group dynamics as stag parties and five-a-side football teams. Terrorism is about ideology, but it’s also about berks.”

The premise of Four Lions is a high-concept one: what would you do if you realised your three fellow suicide bombers were morons? Such a dilemma faces Omar (Riz Ahmed), a witty, well adjusted, happily married jihadist from Doncaster, who provides a welcome, if implausible, focus for audience empathy and helps to sustain at feature length what might otherwise have been a single-gag movie. It would certainly be a stroke of satirical genius if the film prompted Morris’s targets to reveal a hitherto little-seen ability to take a joke.

This article originally appeared in the May 2010 edition of Prospect.