Chris Morris' FOUR LIONS Unleashed! First Images From The Terrorist Comedy!

by Todd Brown, November 17, 2009 4:55 PM

In bad taste? Quite possibly. Brilliant and hysterically funny? Almost certainly. If I've learned anything about absolutely fearless British satirist Chris Morris in the years that I have followed his career it is very definitely to expect brilliance teetering on the edge of no return. This is, after all, the man who once sparked public protest by dedicated an entire episode of his mock-news program Brass Eye to a satiric treatment of pedophilia or, rather, the media's handling of same.

And, if anything, Morris' debut feature Four Lions - created with the help of Peep Show writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong - is going to be even more incendiary. He has, you see, created a comedy about jihad. There is a fairly tame synopsis on the website of sales agents The Wild Bunch but I greatly prefer this summary sent out to those who signed up on an official email list dedicated to the project a while back:

Many people have asked us exactly what the Four Lions project is. Clearly we can't launch the film before its been shot, but I've pulled together a few paragraphs from the paperwork that's been flying around. Its shameless hype but its accurate - unlike almost everything you will have read in the press. No one who has read the script could disagree with a word here.
In three years of research, Chris Morris has spoken to terrorism experts, imams, police, secret services and hundreds of Muslims. Even those who have trained and fought jihad report the frequency of farce. At training camps young jihadis argue about honey, cry for their mums, shoot each other's feet off, chase snakes and get thrown out for smoking. A minute into his martyrdom video, a would-be bomber looks puzzled and says "what was the question again?" On millennium eve, five jihadis set out to ram a US warship. They slipped their boat into the water and carefully stacked it with explosives. It sank.

Terrorist cells have the same group dynamics as stag parties and five a side football teams. There is conflict, friendship, misunderstanding and rivalry. Terrorism is about ideology, but it's also about berks.

Four Lions is a funny, thrilling fictional story that illuminates modern British jihad with an insight beyond anything else in our culture. It plunges us beyond seeing these young men as unfathomably alien. It undermines the folly of just wishing them away or alienating the entire culture from which they emerge. It understands how terrorism relates to testosterone. It understands jihadis as human beings. And it understands human beings as innately ridiculous. As Spinal Tap understood heavy metal and Dr Strangelove the Cold War, Four Lions understands modern British jihadis.

Principal photography has now wrapped on the picture and editing begun and the first three official stills have now been released. Check them in the gallery below!

Galleries

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