Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
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.
Four Lions is a genuinely singular achievement — a pitch-black British satire about homegrown terrorism that manages to be both laugh-out-loud funny and genuinely unsettling. Chris Morris's script is razor-sharp, threading the needle between farce and tragedy with remarkable confidence. The ensemble cast, led by Riz Ahmed, delivers naturalistic, deeply committed performances that ground the absurdity in real human stupidity and delusion. The film's novelty is exceptional: no other film has tackled jihadist radicalisation from this angle — making the terrorists bumbling idiots without ever trivialising the horror of what they intend. Cinematography is functional handheld realism, effective but unremarkable. The ending, while emotionally impactful and thematically coherent, loses some of the film's anarchic comic energy as it tips more heavily into tragedy, feeling slightly conventional relative to the daring of what came before.