Rating: 4/5
Verdict: Laceratingly funny
When will 9/11 humour become all right, do you think? Well, in the US maybe never. Website jokes aside (the kindest I can find is: When does a pentagon have four sides? When it intersects a plane), the Americans are still probably some distance from finding the event's funny bone.
Enter the Brits, then, led by the iconoclastic Morris, the brains behind the spoof documentary series Brass Eye (which brilliantly satirised moral panics about social ills such as drugs and paedophilia). Here he crafts a laceratingly funny spoof about jihadism which dances elegantly along the edge of bad taste without ever tipping over.
In part, that's because his intent is deadly serious. Having undertaken three years of research before writing the script, he concluded that British-based jihadists are less agents of terror than they are gullible oafs ("How many virgins did you say would be awaiting me in Paradise?") to whom laughter is the only sane response.
The film, set and shot in Sheffield, follows a hapless quintet of young Muslim men set on becoming suicide bombers. As Omar (Ahmed) and Waj (Novak) attend a terrorist training camp in Pakistan, the belligerent, foul-mouthed Barry (Lindsay), who fancies himself the leader of the cell, recruits Hassan (Ali) and attempts, none too successfully, to control the dim-witted plan by Faisal (Akhtar) to train crows to be suicide bombers.
If truth is the first casualty of war, the film argues, the first casualty of fanaticism is anything approaching intellectual coherence. Barry, the staunchest of the band, as befits his non-Arab lineage, blames the breakdown of the car he said he'd fixed on the poor-quality spark plugs: "They're Jewish," he screams. "Jews invented spark plugs to control global traffic."
The film plays with contradictions to both chilling and hilarious effect: Omar's wife and son support his announced plans as though he were training for a triathlon and, when he gets cold feet, she chides him that "you were loads more fun when you were going to blow yourself up".
But as the film hurtles towards a climax that is bleakly comic and horribly realistic, our laughter turns sour in our mouths. Like the best of satirists from Jonathan Swift to In the Loop's Armando Iannucci, Morris isn't going for cheap shots. He knows that it's a very thin line indeed between laughter and screaming.
LOWDOWN
Cast: Riz Ahmed, Nigel Lindsay, Kayvan Novak, Adeel Akhtar, Arsher Ali
Director: Chris Morris
Running time: 97 mins
Rating: R13 (offensive language, sexual references)
