The lighter side of terrorism?

FOUR LIONS is a wonderful, witty, dark comedy by expert comedian Chris Morris. It's hard to watch at times, but harder to look away from and even harder to stop laughing at. And the main character, Omar (Riz Ahmed), is one of the most sympathetically portrayed Muslim men I've seen in a movie.

Normally, I would simply recommend it to everyone who likes dark comedies and end the review here--before getting into minor spoilers--but Omar and his friends are Muslim terrorists who go to a training camp in Pakistan to learn how to become suicide bombers. So there are definitely issues to discuss.

This is basically a caper comedy, largely about the group's wacky screwball antics such as eating their phones' SIM cards to avoid government satellites or training crows to be suicide bombers. Another major component of the humor is the contrast between the cell's terrorist activities and its members' otherwise normal, northern England working-class lives.

Omar in particular is happily married, and his plot is supported by his wife and son. There's one darkly hilarious scene, which would be touching in any other context, in which he considers leaving the cell, but his family encourages him not to give up his goal.

So why isn't this film just a racist fantasy, the kind of scary-Muslims-are-everywhere movie that Glenn Beck or Juan Williams would approve of? There are four reasons.

First, the authorities are no better. They're portrayed as racists too obsessed with Muslims (and people that "look like Muslims") to fight terrorism. And they're just has comically incompetent as the terrorists.

Second, this means that there's no message of patriotic pro-British triumphalism in this movie, but even more importantly, there's no message of fear. There's certainly tension about violence, but no one could come away from the movie feeling like Islamic terrorism is an existential threat that we should reshape our entire society to defeat.

The third reason this film isn't Islamophobic is that it makes a clear distinction between Islam and terrorism. Omar's brother is an ultra-conservative imam who's criticized by Omar's wife for having the women sit in a "cupboard" during prayers, but he pleads with Omar to stop his plot.

Even many on the left accept the claim that moderate Muslims are "the good ones," but that "we have to watch out for the extremists," as if any sufficiently religious Muslim becomes a terrorist. But this movie does not.

The fourth and most important reason is that this movie is about characters rather than stereotypes. They have relationships and personalities and seem nothing like the caricatures of terrorists that fill movies today.

As he made the film, Morris consulted former Guantánamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg to see if there was anything that might be offensive to British Muslims. Begg watched the finished film at a special screening, alongside another former detainee, and they said they loved it.

The movie does have a major political weakness on the question of motivation. The reasons the movie gives for why these men might resort to terrorism are almost entirely vague frustrations with consumerism and Western culture, an explanation that could have come directly from Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations.

Imperialism is almost ignored. Palestinians and Afghans are each mentioned, and Omar says at one point that his uncle died defending a mosque in Bosnia, but that's it. The real grievances of Muslims living in Britain--whose poverty rate is twice the national average, for instance--are reduced to undue police attention and unfair suspicions of terrorism. And, of course, those suspicions are valid for the main characters.

But this doesn't mean that anyone should skip Four Lions--or they'd be missing a great political comedy.