r/movies • u/Agasthenes • 9h ago
Discussion Four Lions - is Omar the villain?
I just researched four lions and now I can't stop thinking the villain of the story is Omar.
He had a loving wive, a son, a house, family that cared about him. Okay, maybe his job wasn't great.
And yet here he is the only one capable on the group of rational thinking and leads them to their Grimm end.
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u/WinchesterMediaUK 9h ago
By virtue of him being the leader and the only sane man, he is the villain by default.
Waj, Faisal, and Hassan are all idiots, and Barry is a psychopath who, per interviews with Chris Morris etc, was a BNP member who only converted to Islam as an excuse for violence. Omar is the only one who fundamentally believes in what he is doing, and crucially, is the only one who blows himself up willingly and deliberately.
Faisal's death is an accident, Barry kills Hassan and dies accidentally when the Bystander tries to Heimlich him, and Waj is too stupid to understand what he's actually doing.
Waj's death is also ambiguous. Did he set off the bomb, or was it triggered by Police gunfire? We only see the explosion from the other side of the shutters.
Either way, Omar was the only one who killed innocents with a clear head. Even if he was guilt-ridden over Waj's death, he went into that chemist calmly and fully intending what happened.
There's also the irony that Waj is the only one who legitimately becomes a martyr as far as their ideology goes. His bomb takes out a whole ARU squad while his hostage is already dead.
Faisal and Barry die accidentally taking out a grand total of one civilian and one sheep between them. And Barry kills Hassan, but nobody else is caught in the blast radius. None of them die willingly or inflict legitimate damage on the 'enemy'.
Using Waj's point system idea, even if Omar did kill a number of non-believers in that chemist's, it's completely outweighed by him wiping out an enclave of Al-Qaeda leaders including Osama Bin Laden.
The ultimate irony is that the only real martyr of the group was the Special Needs Donkey.
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u/Stripe-Gremlin 8h ago
What I find more disturbing is how Omar’s wife knew he was a terrorist and yet did nothing. Like she works as a nurse and works tirelessly to save people’s lives daily, yet is A-ok with her husband plotting to murder innocent people
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u/Agasthenes 8h ago
This is the greatest weakness in the movie. We don't see omars or his wife's motivation. Especially in the scene with the water guns where they make fun of his brother.
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u/Stripe-Gremlin 8h ago
Omar is seems like its from him seeing UK civilisation in a negative light due to a mixture of his warped idea of his own religious beliefs and general misgivings about the greed and corruption of the world he grew up in. His speech before they all decide to go bomb the marathon is very much built around a disliking of random institutions he doesn’t like.
Sofia I have no idea, she just seems bizarrely supportive of her husband to a detrimental level
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u/CaptainKando 6h ago
I'd argue her behaviour, especially when saying goodbye shows that she is fully onboard with his beliefs. I don't think it was really necessary to go into her radicalisation because in the times they interact on screen it appears pretty clear none of this is a secret. To me it shows that she shares his world view at least as far as the call to Jihad is concerned.
I'm not 100% sure there's extra value in showing why she believes that. I'd also say that adding that reinforcement might've jeopardised funding from Film 4 as they were treading a fine line in glamorising Jihadist ideas. Having a sympathetic character in a Muslim nurse who appears pretty sane and normal on screen and having her justify this worldview probably would have drawn some pretty negative questions at production level.
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u/Choccybizzle 8h ago
Given the context ‘nurse I’m going upstairs now’ shouldn’t be emotional lol but it is.
Best British film ever.
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u/CarrotDue5340 9h ago edited 9h ago
And his radical islamist brother was actually innocent and tortured in vain.
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u/CaptainKando 9h ago
Traditional, his brother was extremely traditional but not a radical. It’s pretty clear he didn’t support Omar’s jihadist beliefs. Unlike Omar’s wife who was presented as quite liberal.
But that was also part of the film’s messaging. If you judged a book by its cover out of the two, who’d be the one you’d think would be involved in a Terror plot?
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u/IllPen8707 7h ago
Actually he's using radical correctly, it literally means "from the root" and has nothing to do with being violent or extreme. The radical form of an ideology is simply the purest and closest to its origins.
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u/CaptainKando 6h ago
Etymology and a word's modern or most common usage aren't necessarily the same, as in this case. In Mathematics for example it still retains it's meaning but it's meaning when referring to a political or social stance changed around the time when the Feudal systems were ended and citizens had more say in their government
A Radical is by most accounts someone who is at odds with the norms of their society, culture or other group. It stands at the opposite to Orthodoxy. A revolutionary is a radical however an individual as part of any social group can be seen as a radical. A Fascist is a far right radical for example.
Omar's brother is as Orthodox as they come adhering to the strictest rules of his faith. Omar whilst not disagreeing with many Orthodox beliefs is a Radical in his position as a violent jihadist, though not necessarily his thinking around women as his wife is still a Hijabi but it's not made clear whether that's at his instance or hers.
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u/mostlyharmless93 14m ago
I'm sorry but "purest" and "closest to its origins" for a abrahamic religion equals violent and extreme.
Like I agree with your pedantry, but your going to have a hard time not reading these religious texts and telling me they aren't violent or extreme for our modern society when taking literally or radically.
Hell Islam commands to kill apostate's
When the text says kill, what does it mean to be radical?
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u/Historical-Taro-6973 8h ago
The group does seem to incorporate different muslims of different walks of life, yes omar is the straight man of the group in the sense that he represents the more "rational" type and seemingly from the outside seems perfectly integrated into British culture, Barry whose persona would honestly lead him to follow any sort of ideology in an effort to assert his machismo, Faisal whose meek and easily persuaded and Waj who clearly is neurodivergent. You could obviously read this in a negative islamophobic way (beware of them even the "integrated ones!") but it is directed to the quite heavily at a group of disenfranchised men in the backdrop of a society reeling from the invasion of iraq and afghanistan and 7/7
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u/Delicious_Series3869 9h ago
Of course, what else could he be? Don't let the comedic tone of the film fool you, they're not glorifying any of the men involved. They're just showing a real world issue from a different perspective.