So Monty Python’s Life of Brian, in my opinion, is one of the most culturally significant works of the past 50 years. Not only is it a fantastic film on its own merits, side splittingly funny, painfully sharp and also a great depiction of Christian belief. But that alone doesn’t make it significant. In 1979, it was also the most daring satire of religion to date; in Britain it blew apart taboos about mocking Christianity. And that was essential in securing our freedom of speech - satire is one of the most effective ways of dealing with belief, and an essential part of freedom of speech - and The Life of Brian really opened the floodgates in this country. 

Even with Christianity, there’s still a way to go. A few years ago, Jerry Springer the Opera collapsed after its producers were threatened with prosecution for blasphemy. So clearly, there’s still some distance to be covered, but encouragingly, the Opera got positive reviews in the official newspapers of both the Church of England (Church Times) and the Catholic Church (Catholic Herald). So now, it seems that Christian desire for censorship, in Britain at least, has been become broadly the preserve of the fringes. 

So I guess in a way that provides a good prelude to another film; Chris Morris’s Four Lions. Firstly, I highly recommend you all watch it, and don’t be put off by what I’m about to say, it’s a very well written film. But I guess my problem with it is really that I had hoped it would take a similar cultural role to the Life of Brian; I hoped that it would break some of the taboo that exists around satirising Islam, but I guess in a lot of ways it’s not really about Islam, it’s purely about suicide bombing. And that though the religion of the bombers is Islam, it could easily be any other religion.

I feel a bit awkward about Four Lions. I think I’ve seen it twice now, once on the opening night with my then boyfriend, and a second time with my current boyfriend, on DVD. And the second time I watched it, I wondered whether I’d just forgotten how much I enjoyed it. My memory of the first time is that it was very funny, but that wasn’t my experience watching the DVD. And I think in part that’s due to the environment - in a packed cinema, there’s enough other people laughing that you feel like you’re laughing at the right bits. Normally, I don’t really care too much, but I think with the topic of suicide bombers, there are bits where you don’t really know how to react, and without a kind of collective verdict to work with, it can just become a profoundly awkward film.

But Four Lions is significant, it’s is a far better moral indictment of suicide bombers than any thundering newspaper editorial. There’s always a fine line between comedy and tragedy. Four Lions is a brilliant indictment of suicide bombers purely for the fact that it does the opposite of what we constantly see on the news. The papers and TV news treat suicide bombers with fear, like they’re some kind of elite unit, the S.A.S of terrorists. And that creates the fear that the terrorists desire, and clearly, here, Four Lions does the opposite; the bombers are constantly bungling it. They’re crap terrorists, in short. It pokes fun at all the flaws; they ‘hate’ western civilisation, but they like Toploader’s Dancing in the Moonlight, they’re meant to be devout, but none of them speak Arabic, they’re meant to be deadly warriors, but they’re useless. In short, they’re portrayed as egomaniacs rather than religious warriors, and that is a far better way to deal with terrorism than fearing it and tearing up our rights.

So perhaps, though Four Lions never took on the same taboo that The Life of Brian did, it took on one that was equally as important and topical. Before now, every movie about terrorism, like Paradise Now or United 93, had treated suicide bombing with a sort of reverence and respect. Four Lions blows that apart (pardon the pun), and that’s a really brave achievement from a very brave Chris Morris.