Beast review: A surprisingly straight story of man vs lion, and actually good
Let’s tackle the elephant – or should that be the lion? – in the room. The concept of new Idris Elba film Beast is flatly ridiculous.
It features a deadly serious scene in which Elba fights a lion with his bare hands. It’s about a man-munching lion skulking around South Africa tearing limbs off locals as aperitifs before the main course: will it nosh on Nate Samuels, the doctor character played by Elba?
Whether or not you enjoy Beast depends on whether or not you can suspend your disbelief enough to get on board with the absurd story. The fact this film takes itself seriously will be jarring for purists who might have expected Beast to be a B-movie the likes of Snakes On A Plane, but I found myself wanting to scream: “Bring me more of these motherfucking lions!”
Elba, of course, is good, as is the chemistry between him and his two daughters Norah (Leah Sava Jeffries) and “Mer” (Iyana Halley). You buy into the grief they’re going through in light of the mother character passing from cancer, especially with nuanced writing by Ryan Engle in the establishing parts that actually feel lifted from real tense family arguments.
In a particularly effective scene set during a dinner soon after the family land in South Africa, when the kids can’t help but blow up in front of family friend Martin, a local anti-poacher played by Sharlto Copley. Copley is great as the long-haired white dude with verbal diarrhoea about The Big Five who drives around in his Land Rover gesticulating at deer, rhino and, you’ve guessed it, lions.
And – not to give too much away – he’s pretty good at playing the guy who’s whimpering in fear in front of a salivating big cat. Elsewhere there’s an admirable reference to Jurassic Park, giving Beast slight B-movie credentials, with one of the daughter characters wearing a vintage 90s t-shirt with the JP branding on the front.
There are some hammy, not very scary, lion moments, but mostly, Beast is actually like a contemporary Jurassic Park, with tense parts, scary parts and, perhaps surprisingly, and definitely commendably, a decent story. In real life, poaching of lions has increased over the past few years, and with all poaching, there is a conversation around the morality of poaching and being an anti-poacher, the type of person that goes around in pursuit of poachers to try and stop them.
A real-life anti-poacher was the subject of another recent film, Where The Crawdads Sing, so the conversation is having a moment, and Beast is progressive in humanising the poachers, who are typically from lower socio-economic backgrounds and often poaching to survive.
Things start to drag towards the end. I don’t know how many more times I could stomach Elba leaning through a car window whispering “trust me” to his daughters before disappearing in pursuit of the bloody thing, there are a few too many cycles of near miss attacks, and close-up shots of the eventually beleaguered animal are rich in CGI but not a whole lot else, making it at times hard to buy into the seriousness the story purports to.
But Beast is ultimately entertaining in all the right ways, while gently threading in a worthwhile message. Some will reject the whole idea in the first place, but I say feed them to the lions.