Starring Riz Ahmed and Kayvan Novak. Unrated. Opens Friday, April 15, at the Vancity Theatre

You know how when some teenagers get crushed in Saturday-night road racing, a couple more chuckleheads follow suit the next weekend? Apparently, terrorism is like that—or at least that’s one message you get from Four Lions, a dark comedy about English louts who put the idiot back in ideology.

The crowd followed here, in fact, makes the shoe bomber and that underwear guy look like Oxford grads. We never learn what’s driving them to jihad, but security guard Omar (Riz Ahmed, who also starred in the nonfunny The Road to Guantanamo) and his not-exactly-religious pals have decided it would be too cool to blow something up, and soon.

Much of the humour comes from the banter between Omar and Waj (Kayvan Novak), who can’t quite tell the difference between chickens and rabbits. This pair actually gets to Pakistan, but an attempt to join a training camp ends in disaster. Back home, two others argue about targets; soft-spoken Faisal (Adeel Akhtar) suggests attacking a pharmacy “because they have those condoms that make you think about white women”, while convert Barry (Nigel Lindsay) wants to hit a mosque “to radicalize the moderates”.

Directed by TV veteran Christopher Morris, using an improv-heavy script he wrote with two others, the film has a tone resembling Ali G set loose in a Ricky Gervais version of Jackass. It’s part of the movie’s complexity, or general messiness (the jokes are quite uneven), that no part of British society is spared the stupid stick. And everyone gets confused. Our semismart hero’s brother (Mohammad Aqil) is a bearded, woman-fearing fundamentalist but he’s actively antiviolence, while Omar’s crowd has decided the West’s essential decadence is enough reason to go all Osama bin Crazy. This from a quartet that names itself after a Disney cartoon.