BEAST (2022) – Review

Hard to believe but Summer will soon be a distant memory, so if you can’t get outta’ town before packing the kids off to school, there’s still time for a virtual “vacay” at the ole’ multiplex. Oops, maybe the tots should skip this excursion. So, is this flick set in romantic Paris, or perhaps on an exotic island? This tale has no ocean or beach, though it has a lot in common with a couple of movie islands (namely Amity and Skull). Still, there are lots of vast open areas to explore and observe the local wildlife (er…see the aforementioned isles). Yes, the wildlife couldn’t be much wilder when a getaway turns deadly when a dad out of his element must protect his daughters from a truly savage ferocious BEAST.

The film’s opening scene sets the tone and premise. An ambush of a lion pride by a group of heavily-armed poachers doesn’t turn out as they hoped when the only surviving cat turns the tables on them. Cut to the next day as a small plane touches down on a dusty South African airstrip. On board is New York doctor Nate Samuels (Idris Elba) who has brought his teenage daughters Norah (Leah Jeffries) and Meredith (Iyana Halley) on vacation to the birthplace of their late mother. The two young women are bickering almost immediately (the heat and no wifi) until the group is met by Nate’s old pal, game preserve manager Martin Battles (Sharlto Copley). The two go way back (Martin introduced Nate to his late wife), so he opens his home to the trio. That evening’s dinner is rough as the girls (especially ‘Mer”) voice their resentment over Nate’s absence during Mom’s illness, as the two had separated earlier. Over late night drinks, Nate tells Martin of his guilt and his hope that the family can bond over the trip. But tomorrow’s a fresh start as Martin loads them up in his jeep for a tour of the sprawling preserve, After a fairly close visit with a friendly pride of lions, the quartet travels to a quaint little village. But instead of friendly faces, they discover eviscerated corpses. And Martin knows the attack is recent (campfires still smoldering), so he hustles his friends back into the jeep just as the killer lion charges them. Naturally, the spot is so remote that they can’t get a signal on their cellphones, walky-talkies, and CB radio. When the jeep fails, can these four possibly survive the jaws and killer claws of this man-killing predator?

Though he’s adept at playing the confident action hero, Elba is able to step into an entirely different heroic role, a man who knows he’s in over his head but somehow pushes himself into protector mode (papa bear, perhaps). As we first meet him, Nate is almost walking on emotional eggshells, trying to say and do the right things to connect with his kin. A few drinks reveal his tremendous remorse over failing to hold the family together. Elba later shows us, through his terrified eyes, that Nate will give his all this time in order to triumph. It helps that he’s got great chemistry with the always engaging Copley whose Martin loves being the “Dutch uncle” while still telling Nate what he needs to hear, the lovely and the ugly. He fawns over the daughters, but his quiet masks a dark secret that will make an impact during the “siege”. Halley as ‘Mer’ mixes the usual teenage rebellion with seething anger towards her dad, thwarting his every effort at re-connecting. The younger Norah played by Jefferies wants to break free of the “baby” role while still craving parental security.

Essential in the “animal attack” genre flick is the impact of the “villain from nature” , so from that aspect the movie works due to the expert CGI rendering and the motion-capture work (I’m sure there will be on the set photos of actors with those padded scuba suits with ping-pong balls and maybe a stuffed lion-head cap). The lion is quite scary and director Baltasar Kormakur knows his thriller history well enough to be frugal with the attacks in the first act. He’s also adept at putting us right “in the action” with his camera swirling about the “prey” as they try to get a ‘lock’ on the attacker’s proximity (the most effect is Nate trying to get out of a maze made of brittle brush and sticks). Ultimately the uneven script gets in his way as the daughters make far too many bad decisions and turn into screeching “bait”. There is a nice sense of panic mixed with claustrophobia in the disabled jeep, though CUJO probably did it better decades ago. And speaking of classic terror creatures, the single-mindedness of the predatory certainly owes much to the JAWS variants as each one seemed to care more about exacting revenge than “chowing down”. And like those “finned fiends”, the unstoppable lion appears to be a very distant relative of Wile E. Coyote (or the more apropos Sylvester the Cat) in that he quickly shakes off any calamity that would disable most animals, and is back in the next sequence with barely a blemish or limp. Plus there are countless “call-backs” as different wildlife trivia and cultural bits are presented early in order to connect with later scenes and the somewhat ludicrous “final showdown”. Elba and Copley do make a terrific team, so let’s hope for another pairing, one more inspired than this fairly “toothless” BEAST.

1.5 Out of 4

BEAST is now playing in theatres everywhere