Review of Baltasar Kormakur’s Beast – decent and suspenseful

Not a bad movie. Quite entertaining. 

This film is an iteration of the Man vs Monster formula. 

That man is the recently-widowed Dr Nate Samuels (Elba) and he is trying to redeem himself over his ostensible past failures with his two daughters (Jeffries and Halley). Although Beast offers no real surprises, it is good at setting out what it wants to achieve; and then it does it. The film has pretty good jumpy scary scenes (especially the scenes of Dr Samuels in the lake) and Kormakur is good at creating tense moments.

The underlying premise involves a lion that has gone rouge. This is reminiscent of the 90s film The Ghost and the Darkness. Particularly when a wounded villager warns that he was attacked by “diabolos”. (This film itself was based on accounts during the British Empire regarding two African lions in Tsavo, Kenya. See YouTube – The Man-Eating Lions of Tsavo). At any rate, in Beast, the lion gets tranquilised, tumbles off a cliff, gets burned, and then finally stabbed! Surely it would make more sense to have made him demonic (as per the 90s version).

To me, the problem with the lion is the Hollywood insistence on casting the villain as being a hapless victim of cruelty as opposed to being inherently evil. So the lion went rogue because we made him do so. What a yawn. If the movie Jaws was being produced today, that shark would be framed as the victim of the marine overfishing, or his pups were savagely hunted by a villager, or the shark is upset about global warming! 

Some of the dialogue is a bit clunky, and there isn’t a whole lot of creativity in the film. Indeed, there is some plain silliness in the plot. Why would anyone venture out of the safety of the car when there’s a lion patrolling the area? Or wade through waterways despite having seen crocodiles plunging in at shore?

The ending of Beast – with Elba punching the lion (!) and getting mauled – reminded me of the film The Grey. In that moving film, Liam Neeson’s character was lost and destroyed following the death of his wife. The film is mostly about a man struggling with grief and surrounded by death. At the start of the film, he’s intent on ending his own life with a rifle. Towards the end - in the love and memory of his former wife - he decides to fight for his life as opposed to throwing it away. It’s a moving scene that connects on a deeper level. (See: The Grey - Once More Into the Fray). Thus, by contrast, Idris’s “fight” with the lion feels hollow, and a bit silly.

Nevertheless, this film is a decent adrenaline hit particularly through a sluggish cinema season. It’s good fun but don’t expect a whole lot.