Fridae

If you look at it, jihad is a very funny business. For every 9/11, there are at least 10 other shoe bombers, diaper bombers, and other assorted incompetent nutjobs providing us entertainment. And if you paid attention to the 9/11 commission, you’d realise that Osama bin Laden’s hilarious, too obvious, 1 in 1,000 plan could only succeed thanks to the CIA and FBI fouling up their counter-terrorism coordination. And thanks to Abu Graib and Michael Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantanamo, we know the “new and improved” post-9/11 American counter-terrorism effort is a most appropriate punchline to a very long joke.

Taking potshots at incompetent terrorists and daft intelligence officers alike, the savage black comedy Four Lions is the only sane response to a post-9/11 world. Taking centrestage is a quartet of radicalised would-be terrorists with very low common sense, intelligence, and a high opinion of themselves. Our anti-heroes bumble their way through a terror attempt from its inception to farcical ending in a series of episodes where everything that can go wrong will go wrong – no thanks to them.

The comedy in this film is fuelled by their fanatical devotion to seeing someone or something getting blown up (audiences are in for a belly of laughs when they announce their bombing target!), the tendency to twist logic and the holy scriptures into Moebius pretzels, and a gift for rewriting abject failures into shining victories.

Four Lions proves that bumbling villains are far more entertaining to watch than bumbling heroes, and is a good companion piece to the Blackadder series and Life of Brian.