Lion Country ain’t no place to safari!
Directed by: Baltasar Kormákur
Written by: Ryan Engle, Jaime Primak Sullivan
Cast: Idris Elba, Sharlto Copely, Iyana Halley, Leah Jeffries
Swift shot: End of the day, the “Beast” was just being a lion. Is it bad that I was rooting for him most of the time? I mean, I definitely wasn’t cheering for the poachers! And, the less said about the annoyance of eldest daughter, Meredith commensurate to how badly I wanted to see her gnawed . . . the better! With Beast, you aren’t getting anything very original; it’s easy to compare it to Cujo. Only, I was hoping for something with more meat the entire movie, something I could sink my teeth into, but it is never really served up.
Idris Elba plays estranged father, Dr. Nate Samuels whose wife has recently died of cancer. Not really knowing what to do with his two teenaged daughters, he decides to take them on a safari in the middle of nowhere in South Africa. Naturally, they aren’t thrilled, at first. But once they meet up with their favorite “Uncle” Martin (Copley) they settle in for the adventure.
Meredith (Halley) is the older daughter, but she is far from the most mature of the two. Norah (Jeffries) is a few years younger, but is at least trying to humor her father by not essentially being the meanest brat on this trip. It might help that Norah is interested in psychology, whereas Mer is focused primarily on photography.
Martin is a game warden in the area, and Nate has arranged for kind of behind the scenes access to see the real Africa. On the surface, everything looks good for them, until they have to visit a local village that has been devastated by a savage beast. That’s all the plot you really need. A big cat is now hunting people in the Savanna, and this family has to try and survive long enough to be rescued by the local wardens.
Oh, sure, there is some stuff in there about personal growth and trusting their father, but again nothing concrete. And there are these visions that Nate keeps having of his deceased wife which had no context to the story. I know what they were going for, but it was handled poorly.
Beast also had the unfortunate aspect of being an unintentional comedy, given the amount of times I heard people laughing throughout the movie in scenes that were supposed to be tense.
In any horror movie, you have to allow for the occasional “idiot factor” but I wonder how many you can count in Beast? I know at least a few times I was thinking, “are these people completely stupid?”
Plus, I had one moment where I yelled out, “Oh, come on!” as one of the characters does something bordering on super heroic. What makes a good creature thriller is watching an ‘every man’ pitted against nature, not someone with ridiculously cat-like reflexes. Still, it was only one scene, so I guess I can allow it.
The movie is engaging and entertaining, but it could easily have been a direct to Sci-Fi Channel creature feature starring B-listers. Beast had some potential, and who knows maybe a sequel will “go there” and give us something more fun to work with in terms of delivery.
[Swift aside: When I was a really little kid, my parents took me to this park in Florida called “Lion Country Safari” and I had a catatonic reaction to being in our little car surrounded by animals on all sides. Think the baboon scene from The Omen for my level of terror. I have always thought a great screenplay idea is waiting to erupt from that park.]
Many years ago, when I watched The Ghost and the Darkness, that night my cat did something he had never done before (or since) where he perched up on the windowsill and looked at me like I was a “Swanson’s TV Dinner.” I was so freaked out by it that I made sure he didn’t sleep in the bedroom with me that night. With Beast, I didn’t feel that at all. But, credit to the effects team for producing some of the best CGI creatures I have ever seen, but the whole time I had to turn off the uncanny valley in my brain that was aware these were cartoons, not cats.
Sadly, Beast won’t leave much of a scar on your psyche. But it’s not a bad time at the theater, either.
