Movie Review: Beast
What We Liked
What We Didn't Like
In an age where most movies without franchise potential are relegated to streaming, it’s refreshing to see Beast receive a theatrical release. Director Baltasar Kormȧkur delivers a lean adventure that plays well on a big screen with an engaged audience. It’s not quite Jaws with claws, but it’s a fun creature feature nonetheless.
Idris Elba stars as Nate Samuels, a widowed doctor who takes his daughters Norah and Mer (Leah Jeffries and Iyana Halley, respectively) on vacation to Africa to catch up with old friend Martin (Sharlto Copley). But a tour into the wild puts them at the mercy of a rogue lion that’s been spooked by poachers and is eager to defend its turf against human threats.
At just over 90 minutes, Beast is admirably focused without feeling rushed. Ryan Engle’s screenplay hints at the threat in its opening sequence, sets up the requisite family tensions, and peppers the story liberally with brutal lion attacks and dangers from other sources, including poachers and an environment where anything that moves can kill.
Kormȧkur, a journeyman director best known for the Denzel Washington/Mark Wahlberg actioner 2 Guns (2013), keeps the momentum from flagging, delivers some clever scares and skillfully ramps up the tension. The computer-generated lion is effective for most of the film, and Kormȧkur wisely obscures several attacks to keep the seams hidden when the CGI gets dodgy. There’s restraint to the carnage, but just enough shown to hint that the lion is a force that shouldn’t be meddled with (for audience members not familiar with lions). Much of the action is limited to an enclosed car, and the film gets a great deal of claustrophobic mileage from those cramped, sweltering quarters.
The cast grounds the far-fetched premise, with Elba in bringing gravitas and intelligence to the lead. Nate’s a doctor, and Elba conveys his quick wit and ability to improvise, and he also brings a sense of remorse and heartbreak over the recent death of Nate’s wife and the failure he feels he’s inflicted on his daughters. Copley doesn’t have much to do except provide exposition, but he’s a charismatic presence and has strong chemistry with Elba. Halley and Jeffries largely play damsels in distress, but Halley is particularly strong at portraying the simmering regret and tension between Mer and her father.
While Engle’s screenplay does an admirable job setting up the film’s premise and set pieces, it’s less successful delivering on the various thematic beats it introduces. A subplot about poachers — and the anti-poachers who attack them — serves only to introduce new villains late in the film before the film abandons it completely. The film can’t quite decide whether the lion is a wild animal protecting its territory or a monster out for blood. And so much of the tension between Nate and his daughters comes from Mer’s belief that he abandoned the family in the wake of their mother’s death that it’s baffling when the climax involves him leaving them to fend for themselves. The film moves quick enough to gloss over these flaws, but they float to the surface once the lights come back up.
In the final act, the script tosses plausibility to the wind altogether, turning into The Terminator with a lion, a beast which by the 80-minute mark has already been tranquilized, shot, tossed off a cliff and blown up. It then proceeds to stalk an entire family — which is traveling by car — across the wilderness to a remote hideaway. In fairness, maybe the lion was just watching the movie earlier, when the stone church the heroes escape to was first pointed out with everything except flashing signs that said “we’ll come back to this later.”
Idris Elba in “Beast.” Photo by Lauren Mulligan/Universal Pictures – © 2022 Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.
Everything culminates in a final brawl that all but ensures the film will be known not as the tense and entertaining thriller it is for its first hour and, instead, as “the movie where Idris Elba punches a lion.” It topples over into ludicrousness, with Elba in a knife fight with the king of the jungle, ending in a denouement that is somehow almost as silly as anything the recent “Jurassic World” franchise has thrown at audiences.
And yet, Beast is still mostly watchable through the ridiculousness, thanks largely to its actors and its focus on being nothing more than a tense and disposable late summer filler. It delivers some scares, some solid action and then splits after 90 minutes. In a summer of bloated, self-important blockbusters, it’s refreshing to see one that’s a bit leaner and meaner.
