I’ve liked and admired Chris Morris ever since Radio 4’s "On the Hour" was released on audio cassette in the very early 90s. It’s strange to think that something so specific – it was very much spoofing the presentation and content of Radio 4 ("And now the news headlines read by the continuity announcer...") – would spawn so many different things. Chief amongst them Alan Partridge. Morris followed it up with The Day Today (which is one of the few satirical programmes that has become more accurate in the twenty years that followed it, something Bill Hicks’s anti-Bush, anti-Gulf War routines have also achieved from beyond the grave) and Brass Eye. The latter hit the headlines with its paedophile special and lead to Morris being demonised by the media. I’ve always believed that this had almost nothing to do with the subject of paedophilia and everything to do with how he was satirising them – the media – and their witless, hypocritical, sensationalist and ignorant coverage of such topics. The Daily Mail and its ilk saw that Morris was attacking them and exposing all their knee-jerk inadequacies and went on the attack.

His new film’s premise seemed deliberately designed to cause uproar and offense in the same sections of the media that already hated him for the Brass Eye episode. The idea of making a comedy about four suicide bombers in England seemed almost too controversial to be real. Was this a massive hoax perpetrated by Morris? Was it designed to generate uproar as part of something else he was genuinely working on? It turned out it wasn’t – he really was making a film about suicide bombers. The usual suspects attacked him, obviously, and there was a small if willing supply of victims of terrorist attacks prepared to condemn the film sight unseen. But the controversy never quite ignited. There were mutterings and a few furious editorials but nothing like the anger I was expecting. I didn’t think, for example, that my local multiplex would’ve dared show something so controversial on any of its twenty screens. But they did. Four times a day.

The cinema audience was small – maybe twenty people – and was mostly made up of Asians. I say that because there was a lot of laughter at jokes I didn’t get at all. Slang terms and cultural references mostly as the foreign language bits were fortunately translated for people like me. They seemed to like their culture being mocked like this because it was done, if not with subtlety, with knowledge. It wasn’t a blacked up man in a turban making jokes about eating dogs and making curry. It was like someone at a Doctor Who convention making a gag about the unintentional oral sex incident in Creature From the Pit. No, actually, it was like a new series episode making a reference back to a story from forty years before. Getting a reference or joke like that makes you feel like the people behind this project have done their research and know what they’re talking about. They aren’t just making cheap jokes at your expense. But that’s just my guess – the audience might've been entirely made up of blacked up white people laughing at what they mistakenly thought was a racist film. It was dark in there.

When it wants to be funny it is very funny. Mark Kermode liked the film because he didn’t think it was trying to be very funny and this helped it tell its story. I would disagree with him here (even though he’s my source of opinions for the 99% of films I’ve never seen) because it is a laugh out loud film in too many places for the humour not to be an integral part of it. Sometimes it is a verbal aside – as in the "would you kill me?" scene – and other times it is pure surreal farce. The terrorists communicating with cute cartoon avatars after infiltrating a children’s social networking site is one such example as is their training crows to fly at specific targets while wearing exploding vests (something the US military tried unsuccessfully with bats during the second world war). The grand finale has them running across London in fancy dress and the costumes are chosen so well that they even make a man running from the police very funny.

The comedy is sharply contrasted by the very real death toll in the movie. People really die in this film and not in funny ways (most of them anyway). I’m fine with this because they strike the right balance. When one of the main characters dies unexpectedly the cinema let out a collective gasp of shock. This was a genuinely unexpected moment and we were stunned. There was a lot of nervous laughter because the manner of his death with quite comical but it nailed home how this was a film which mixed the silly and the realistic. Getting the tone of that moment exactly right meant we were prepared for what followed at the end.

I only have two real problems with the film and neither of them stopped me enjoying it. The first is that the main characters seemed to have no motivation for what they were doing. They were would-be suicide bombers because they wanted to be suicide bombers. Anyone who believes, deep down, that all Asians and all Muslims are suicide bombers would look at this film and have their prejudices confirmed. Of the five main characters, only Barry – who is a white convert to Islam – seems to be filled with a genuine reason for wanting to do it (and his reason is that he’s basically insane and has just latched on to the nearest thing that will give him a platform for his nihilism). The others have a vague idea that it will get them to paradise and this seems to be enough to make them want to kill innocent people. Omar – the man who would normally be the hero of the movie – has a lovely wife and perfectly adequate child and lives in a nice house. They discuss his impending martyrdom and while the child can’t quite understand it (but only in that way that children often can’t quite grasp what adults mean when they talk about abstract or future things) his wife is absolutely fine with it. They discuss it like he was going to buy some new luggage or join Facebook. I found it odd to say the least and it just adds fuel to the impression that this is what "those people" are really like. A husband killing himself (and others) is something a wife and son would be fine with. Imagine this was a film about the IRA and your main character was a terrorist whose wife was basically fine with him blowing himself up but didn’t seem that interested. Imagine a film about the IRA where the terrorist himself doesn’t appear to have a political bone in his body. It wouldn't quite ring true.

Omar has a brother – a devout Muslim – who is portrayed as by far the weirder of the two. He refuses to be in the same room as his brother’s wife because she is a woman and he is a man. He quotes the scriptures and has a preposterous beard. He’s also fundamentally non-violent and strongly opposes Omar’s wish to get to heaven by spilling innocent blood. So not all Muslims are violent – only the normal looking ones. There didn’t seem to be a single normal Muslim in the whole film. No one who had faith but eschewed the two extremes of violence and orthodoxy.

The other problem is that these men are shown to be buffoons. That’s the point of this movie – suicide bombers who are also slapstick idiots. The fall over a lot. They get everything wrong. They bumble about the place like Dad’s Army in exploding vests. Except that even these incompetent imbeciles manage to make rather a lot of high explosive using goods they buy in shops. There is plenty of comedy and farce on the way but they make their own bombs and those bombs work. I was expecting the final sequence to involve things going wrong but the things that went wrong were everything except the bombs. The plans failed but the bombs worked. I wanted Omar to press the detonator and nothing happened. Or he sent the signal from his mobile phone and accidentally rang a takeaway. Something like that. Instead, the bombs worked. People died and things blew up. The police – who had been following them off and on for ages – couldn’t prevent them blowing things up. It made me feel a bit uneasy about how easy it all was. Not only could every Muslim want to be a suicide bomber, every Muslim could easily be a suicide bomber. You don’t even need to be any good at it to kill a bunch of innocent people.

So as a comedy Four Lions works because it is very funny in places and goes far beyond just being a witless farce. There is intelligence and courage in the humour as well as people falling over and discussions about which is more like a bear – a wookie or the honey monster. But the issues it raises are dealt with in a confusing way because the characters have no explicit motivation for their actions and they kill a lot of innocent people despite being the Asian equivalents of Norman Wisdom, Frank Spencer and Mr Bean. It’s the sort of thing adult cartoons have been doing for over a decade but seeing it with real people and a real branch of Boots exploding made me uncomfortable. Which, knowing Chris Morris, was probably the idea.