A lion’s share of nothing

SET in South Africa, Nate Samuels brings his two daughters Meredith (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Sava Jeffries) to the place he met their late mother, in an effort to reconnect with his estranged daughters.

Hosted by long-time family friend, Martin (Sharlto Copley), the group are soon attacked by a rogue lion in an isolated wildlife reserve.

Like it sounds, Beast is a very simple, straightforward film, and sounds like a B-movie you might come across at random while browsing through a streaming platform, or in a pile of pirated DVDs at the pasar malam back in the “old days”.

The big difference is, for some unfathomable reason, heavyweight actor Idris Elba is the lead (as Nate), and he is joined by Copley, who was excellent in the science fiction films by Neill Blomkamp.

Why are these two in this? Did Elba join just so he can add “I punched a lion” to his resume, alongside “I punched The Rock”?

Short, aimless

Rounding off at the 90-minutes-of-runtime sweet spot, and being the lion version of Cujo, Beast has all the makings of being a decent survival thriller, and somehow flounders almost the entire time by being neither thrilling nor entertaining.

It is a lean film with a basic story that loses itself to the ground its standing on in favour of being a rather generic “man vs animal” thriller.

There is a scene between Elba and Copley the night before the lion attacks occur that is compelling enough to be a completely different film about an absent father, the devastation of cancer on surviving family members and loss of friendships.

Then there is the on-the-nose commentary on the effects of animal poaching, the loss of entire animal species’, and so on.

Both of these feel disjointed from the core part of the film, which is the story of a lion attacking a family in the African wilderness.

Other than a select few films like Jaws, The Grey, and very recently Crawl, most “man vs. animal” films are bad, but the entertainment value comes from a cocktail of just how terrible the stories can get and how many dumb decisions characters in these films can make before dying from a gruesome death.

These don’t necessarily exist in Beast.

PG-13’fied

Don’t get it mistaken; Beast has characters periodically making bad decisions from the start to the end, by both the main and side characters.

The reason these aren’t entertaining is due to two factors.

The only group that gets punished for silly decision-making are the poachers, while the annoying, borderline grating children – who persistently put themselves and their father in harms way – live to the end of the film.

This leads to the second factor why watching Beast, a film about a man-eating lion, is boring; while the body count is high, the audience doesn’t see much of the “man-eating”.

People are attacked and then die, most of the times off-screen, and it’s very bland. There is nothing “unique” about any of the lion’s attacks either, and the lack of shock filmmaking is a detriment, because the audience isn’t shown the viciousness of nature.

There is an entire village that is slaughtered by the lion, and Beast shows something like three villagers lying dead in a darkly-lit hut. This also applies to many of the attacks, before and after this particular sequence.

“Show, don’t tell” is often repeated for films such as these, and while Beast certainly shows, director Baltasar Kormákur does so such a family-friendly, Disney way that I was secretly hoping there would be an end-credits scene saying the lion in this was actually Scar from 2019’s live action Lion King.

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