Four Lions (2010)
Directed by Chris Morris
Four Lions tells the story of a group of British jihadists who push their abstract dreams of glory to the breaking point. As the wheels fly off, and their competing ideologies clash, what emerges is an emotionally engaging (and entirely plausible) farce.
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What critics compared Four Lions to
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Visuals Themes Characters Dialogue
But Morrisâ?? precision as co-writer and director finds echoes of Dr. Strangelove , as well as a form of transcendence in the ridiculous.
Relating Four Lions to the brilliant Dr. Strangelove (1964) -- as some have -- is like relating a firecracker to a nuclear weapon.
We knew watching Dr. Strangelove that the crazed military types, George C. Scott’s Buck Turgidson and Sterling Hayden’s Jack D. Ripper, were liberal punching bags.
He even shows how the official response will be at once a whitewash and an encouragement to the conspiracy-prone future generation of jihadists: 'The police shot the right man," intones a government official, summoning the black tone of Dr. Strangelove, 'but the wrong man exploded."…
I'm certainly not making the comparison, but Four Lions has the balls of a Network, a Dr. Strangelove, and a M*A*S*H.
More than anything, the film works as a conceptual prank, a parody of the supposedly universal cliches of "humanist" cinema; to ram this point home, Morris has Omar tell his little son a bedtime story based on Disney's The Lion King (1994).