YMMV / Four Lions

• Awesome Music: The film manages to make Toploader's "Dancing In The Moonlight" a musical highlight.
• Crosses the Line Twice: More than a couple of times actually considering this movie's premise.
  • Hassan's Establishing Character Moment includes him attending the same Muslim moderation as Barry, revealing himself to be armed with a bomb vest, rapping about it, and then setting it off, revealing the vest to be nothing more than confetti-filled party poppers. The audience around him go from scared from their lives to booing him out of the room.
    Hassan: What, just cuz I'm Muslim you thought it was real?
  • Alice seems like a regular Cloudcuckoolander, being perky and completely blind to the fact her new friends' house is filled with supplies for homemade explosives. Turns out she's also homophobic, as Omar convinces her to never talk to them again by (hesitantly) going along with her accusations that they are all gay.
  • Being the idiots they are, it's no surprise that none of the suicide bombings go as well as they planned, with two in particular being hilarious for how anticlimactic and cruel they are:
    • Faisal blows up after tripping over a stone fence, his only victim a single sheep. Everyone's horrified reactions are the cherry on top.
    • And then there's Barry who goes out in a particularly karmic way: he begins choking on the SIM card he swallowed, and a Heroic Bystander attempts the Heimlich maneuver on him. Long story short: one man choked, two men died.
      Bystander: And catch the peanut. (BOOM!)
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Faisal isn't a flat-out simpleton like Waj, but he's still fairly dim, gullible, and childlike, and his father is all but stated to have schizophrenia or dementia ("seeing creatures that aren't there").
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In 2010, before the wave of terrorist attacks in Western Europe, the idea of terrorists in Britain being largely incapable of mass casualty attacks had some traction. Nowadays, not so much.
  • A terrorist attack on a marathon in a major city? Cue April 15, 2013.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The film was released in August of 2010, possibly around the same time that the Geronimo operation, which led to the death of Osama bin Laden, was being planned.
• Memetic Mutation: "Rubber dinghy rapids, bro!" has easily become the most quoted line from the movie.
• Moral Event Horizon: Barry blowing up Hassan when he bottles out and tries to surrender to a police officer who happens upon them. This is a particularly interesting example since it counts as an MEH from both a pro and anti jihad viewpoint. Either Barry blew up two people and made it so that they can never be held accountable for their plotting, or it's an MEH because he made Hassan's choice for him, rendering his suicide bomb pointless and denying his reward in the afterlife.
• One-Scene Wonder: Benedict Cumberbatch as a particularly inept police negotiator attempting to talk down Waj.
• Strawman Has a Point: Barry claiming that you can't win an argument just by being right. It's probably not what he meant but still: to win an argument you have to show why you're right.
• Tear Jerker: Omar pretends to be a doctor so he can deliver a coded message to his wife, a hospital receptionist: "I've finished my shift, I'm taking my team to the top floor"
  • Also when he hears Waj kill himself over the phone after trying to talk him out of it... and then walks into Boots.
    • ...and it wasn't even a branch of Boot's, just some cheap little independent pharmacy, making Omar's gesture seem even more tragic and futile.
  • At the end, over the montage of the aftermath of what the Lions did, one of Omar's co-workers is revealed to believe a conspiracy theory that what happened was a False Flag Operation and that Omar and the others were fall guys for some kind of Government Conspiracy... because he always found Omar such a nice and likable person that he simply can't believe that he would be involved in a plot to murder people.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Even though Omar's brother Ahmed is innocent of plotting terrorism and ends up arrested on this false charge, he's still an obscenely misogynistic fundamentalist who imprisons his wife and female relatives in a tiny room - something very illegal in the UK and subject to prison time. As a result, his arrest comes off as somewhat less an innocent man persecuted by a prejudiced government and more a criminal domestic abuser rightfully busted on the wrong charge. He's also aware of his brother planning a terror attack but fails to inform the authorities, which also warrants criminal charges.
• The Woobie: Faisal. Waj takes over later on.

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