LITTLE TERRORS (Maninder Chana). 103 minutes. Some subtitles. Opens Friday (September 12). For venues and times, see listings. Rating: NN
The title misleads. Little Terrors is neither a horror comedy nor a rambunctious kids’ movie. Far from it. This sombre drama centres on a Pakistani-American boy raised as a strict Muslim whose father sends him at 13 to Pakistan, where a group of terrorists/insurgents takes him and a handful of others to a wilderness camp to train as suicide bombers.
Despite a few ripped-from-the-headlines elements, director Maninder Chana doesn’t go for the journalistic exposé: a little boot camp training, a few indoctrination lectures. None of it seems nearly intense enough to build an average soldier, let alone a committed jihadi.
The characters are likewise thin. The trainers are benign fatherly types dishing out homilies as they administer severe beatings with a stern-but-fair demeanour. It’s clear they’re utterly unscrupulous, but all we know about them are their political views. The trainee kids are one-note characters: a bully, an eight-year-old, a kid who’s developmentally delayed, and central character Samih (Armaan Kabli), who shows traces of compassion.
The neutral performances and story give only a few tiny glimpses of anyone’s inner life. Possibly, we’re meant to make up our own minds about matters, but that usually works better when we’re given something complex to mull over.
