Idris Elba does indeed punch a lion in the face in Beast. That’s why it was made, wasn’t it and that’s why anyone would go to see it? Just for the thrill of pitting the eminently masculine Elba against the king of the jungle. It’s such a wafer-thin premise around this particular set-piece, with pitifully manufactured family drama and vacant gestures towards animal rights, that it’s a wonder the movie wasn’t just allowed to be a ninety-three minute fight. That would have made it a mite more honest, and a lot more entertaining.
Instead what Beast is (a first-draft title if ever there was one), is a passionless, formulaic attempt to be Jaws for the African wilderness. Elba plays a doctor, Nate Samuels, who takes his two daughters to South Africa, the home of their recently deceased mother. While touring a game reserve with an old family friend they come upon a decimated village and shortly thereafter a violent killer lion who seems to have gone rogue, stalking and mauling humans in retribution for the loss of his pride to poachers. The film opens on this act to both explain the reason for the lions’ hostility and to emphasize a fierce anti-poaching stance. It also makes clear to show a healthy pride that is generally friendly towards humans as a way of averting any kind of Jaws-like effect to its’ characterization of lions. You are meant to respect the animals as much as fear them. And one of the few nice things I will say is that this effect isn’t hard, given the lions look a touch more authentic than typical CGI animals in movies as of late (although I might just be throwing it a bone because they looked a lot better than in Prey). Further, the main killer lion is used to some effectiveness -not so much in the actual attacks, which especially on the vehicle only bring to mind the far more thrillingly shot sequences of Jurassic Park, but in the more staid scenes of dread that cast the lion as a calculating predator.
These are the moments outshined though, as the movie doesn’t have much of an interest in suspenseful pacing when in-your-face chaos is an available device. That can work too, but director Baltasar Kormákur makes the scenes too messy and frantic to convey any weight, even with a decent degree of authentic gore to the injuries. Each of the car attack scenes are diminished by this, failing to capture any reality of the lion to cement its’ danger. The lion looking over the car from a rock above is tense, it grasping under the car manically for Nate isn’t so much.
But even deficiencies in this kind of action-execution could be assuaged if there was any kind of attachment towards the people involved. Beast is a film though that chooses the easiest and lamest tool of manufacturing that investment by way of a poorly written and awkwardly raised backstory around the death of the girls’ mother and prior to that Nate’s separation from her -the two biggest cliché ‘broken family’ trademarks in one movie. Of course the older daughter Meredith (Iyana Halley) resents Nate’s apparent distance during their mothers’ cancer period while the younger Norah (Leah Sava Jeffries) is more willing to forgive him. But it is so painfully contrived a source of conflict and not even Elba makes it believable. It’s nakedly written into the movie as obligation because a better means of connection to the characters couldn’t be thought of. Tragedy is not necessary though, especially for this kind of movie. To bring up Prey again, that was a very similar film of a human facing off against a great predator which built immense interest in its’ protagonist with neither tragedy nor even much backstory at all needed to support our engagement. It’s not overly difficult to do.
Instead the plotting drags on the already fairly uninteresting action and does nothing for lending the characters any personality. The story gossip hounds are running with is the one of how Elba’s daughter auditioned to play his characters’ daughter and lost out due to a lack of chemistry with her own father -which is a bit unfair given how hard it is to maintain chemistry with anyone under this script (I can’t imagine her being any better or worse than the actresses cast). Elba himself manages to get by on that movie star charisma of his, and Sharlto Copley playing his friend and guide occasionally plays up the B-movie cheesiness of the piece, but it’s nothing to sway the films’ entrenched severe tone that refuses to let it be camp in the way it probably ought to be.
Every so often it makes gestures towards themes of loss or nature, but they are entirely unremarkable and hollow. Nate has a couple mystifying dream sequences that would be evocative in seclusion, but within the films’ context are robbed of sincerity and even beauty. And particularly the one where he follows his deceased wife through a labyrinth dotted with African women in seeming spiritual significance, it feels like a shallow effort to mimic that imagery of African heritage, that sense of African pride that is a popular aesthetic in Hollywood right now. Nowhere else does the movie make any real concessions to the importance of African culture -Nate’s family could just as easily have been white.
There are other like missed opportunities. For instance there isn’t much said about poaching beyond how reprehensible it is (to this end the film posits a silly counterpart binary: anti-poachers, who apparently go around vigilante-style poaching the poachers). Poachers actually do show up and cause trouble for the heroes before swiftly being picked off by the lion -and leading to what seems to be a mostly arbitrary fetch quest for Nate. But there’s no interest in say, interrogating that trade while the poachers are around, the active colonialism that it represents. For the very thing that is responsible for the behaviour of the antagonizing lion it’s a subject shockingly simplified.
But it does culminate in Elba wrestling a lion, which if nothing else is a sight to see. No other movie gives you that. But it’s not much to build an entire feature film around. Beast is a shallow, derivative C-grade monster flick that wants to think it’s a serious action thriller -and every impulse to the latter takes away from the former. What’s left is a movie that is neither as fun as it might be nor as cogent. When I went to the cinema, an ATM error had it mistakenly listed as Beast, the psychological thriller from 2017 starring Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn. Wish I could have seen that instead.
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