Hakuna Matata, Mofo
The unofficial Idris Elba film festival continues with director Baltasar Kormákur’s entry into the hallowed man-vs-beast sub-genre.
Beast
Director: Baltasar Kormákur • Writer: Ryan Engle
Starring: Idris Elba, Iyana Halley, Leah Sava Jeffries, Sharlto Copley, Tafara Nyatsanza, Naledi Mogadime
USA • 1hr 33mins
Opens Hong Kong September 1 • IIB
Grade: B
There’s something ceaselessly entertaining about person versus less evolved mammal/reptile thrillers. They’re even better when they involve poachers trying to make a quick buck off dudes hoping to bone up bigger and better by eating tusks or some shit. It’s what made the (unfulfilled) premise of Jurassic World: Dominion so appealing. Finally! Dinosaurs will rule the earth with us on it and put us in our damned places. That was a flameout on that front; most are. But it doesn’t make the kooky sub-genre any less amusing. Jaws is an all-timer for a reason, wonky FX or otherwise. One of Liam Neeson’s strongest geriaction entries is The Grey, in which he goes mano a mano with a wolf that’s been harassing him and some other plane crash survivors. Lions are irresistible killer beast fodder, as in Prey, where Peter “RoboCop” Weller’s family finds itself, well, prey, and the recent Rogue, with Megan Fox (!) as an elite SEAL team commander (!!) whose hostage extraction gets messed up thanks to a, well, rogue lion.
Into this grand tradition comes the aptly titled Beast, starring Idris Elba as a kinda sorta crappy dad with two daughters, all of them grieving their recently deceased wife/mother (the fractured family is a favourite plot point in these films). At the helm this time is Baltasar Kormákur, the Icelandic indie director who made a splash with the aggressively Scandinavian oddball comedy 101 Reykjavík, then proceeded to bang out a series of survival thrillers – Everest, The Deep, Adrift – before creating the underrated, under-seen Netflix volcano mystery series Katla (as well as directing four episodes). Beast is in good hands, and really, bottom line: If Jason Statham can punch a prehistoric shark in the face (The Meg), then Stringer Bell can throw hands with a seriously pissed off lion.
Allow me to explain how this will end
Beast begins with a standard prologue, wherein a bunch of poachers murder a pride of lions, missing only the big male. Some take the females away, a couple linger to find the true prize and woops. Wrong move. Dad’s pissed and he makes short work of them. Cut to widowed doctor Nate Samuels (Elba) arriving by bush plane with his sullen and contrarian daughter Meredith (Iyana Halley) – “It’s just Mere” – and her younger sister, the more sensitive, heavily wired Norah (Leah Sava Jeffries) to their mother Amahle’s (Naledi Mogadime) hometown in South Africa. The trio is trying to heal the wounds left by her death and, especially Mere’s, festering resentment over Nate and Amahle’s divorce. They stay with an old friend, “Uncle” Martin (Sharlto Copley, who must be cast in South African films by law), a wildlife biologist and possible poacher hunter, who takes the Samuels on a private, off-the-beaten-track safari the next day. Did we mention he’s also a lion specialist, who delivers Chekhov’s Lion Behaviour Seminar near the beginning? Well, he is. And he does.
Before long, the group discovers that the lion whose family was wiped out is stalking and murdering any and all hoo-mans in “his territory.” Basically a Korean revenge thriller, or maybe a little John Wick, breaks out, with the Samuels stumbling onto the warpath. You know what comes next: dumb decisions, self-sacrifice, affirmation of the family structure, and a couple of tremendous set pieces, one involving the kid both staying in the damn car and stabbing the lion with a dart. Norah FTW!
Nope. No machete-ing
Because of course there’s family drama
Beast is a prime slab of B-movie trashy fun that knows exactly what it is and shamelessly leans into its tropes. If there were a drinking game that demanded a swig every time someone said, “Stay in the [transport item/built structure]” and then the dumb-ass, (usually) kid exits said item, you’d be wasted after 60 minutes. The dialogue is ripe, the story is all text (the two old friends are Black and white and old enough to have grown up during the Apartheid era, but screw that…LIONS!), and the characters are archetypes meant to serve the plot, not actual characters with arcs that tell us something about humanity’s fraught relationship with the untamed parts of our world.
But… Kormákur keeps Beast’s action efficiently clipping along and manages a few decent oners while he’s at it, the cast is strong enough to elevate the goofy AF nonsense (anyone who’s been to Africa knows the first rule of safari is never get out the damn car you idiot!) well above its station, the CGI is polished and well deployed, there is a cheeky sense of self-aware humour on display (“Dad, can’t you hotwire a car?” “No, I went to medical school!”), and you can never go wrong with that South African landscape. If only the lion could have won. — DEK
More Beast besting
The Shallows (2016) d: Jaume Collet-Serra
A genre gem. A Great White shark gets all up in a grieving wypipo and her bikini’s business. Beast Kill Count: 3.
Backcountry (2017), d: Adam MacDonald
Canada will kill you! A romantic proposal goes to gory hell out in the bush when a hungry Kodiak gets all up in some wypipo’s business. Beast Kill Count: 1
Lake Placid (1999) d: Steve Miner
In this stone classic, giant crocs gets all up in cursing Betty (literally) White’s wypipo business. Beast Kill Count: 2