The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C-
In the pantheon of great man vs. animal thrillers, Beast isn’t one of them. The biggest downfall of this movie is its inability to commit to being either a straight, serious take on the subgenre (like Jaws or Cujo) or a an intentionally campy take on the genre (like Lake Placid or Anaconda) or an unintentionally campy take on it (like Jaws: The Revenge or Orca). Consequently, Beast is a tepid, completely forgettable entry that I will struggle to remember in a couple of weeks. It isn’t a terrible movie, but it’s the kind of throwaway film that makes me wonder why anyone put forth the effort to make it.
Idris Elba stars as Dr. Nate Samuels, who is bringing his two daughters on vacation in the African wilderness to reconnect with them. They are joined by Nate’s old friend Martin, who is some kind of wildlife expert, and they are attacked by a rampaging lion. That’s about it as far as plot goes, as the film becomes a generic version of every one of these movies that you’ve ever seen.
The biggest problem with Beast is the title character, as the movie goes out of its way to make this the least frightening lion since baby Simba. In fact, he bears a resemblance to Simba in that you will not believe for one second that this is a real lion. I realize that it’s much easier to just make a lion on a computer than to go through the trouble of training and filming actual lions, but that sure as hell doesn’t make it the better option. And it’s not impossible either because The Ghost and the Darkness did this shit with real lions 26 years ago. This movie is never tense because it always looks like a grown-up version of Brave Heart from The Care Bears is just having an adorably bad day. These people may have a lion problem, but Dark Heart won’t be showing his face there anytime soon.
Somehow even more distracting than the cartoon lion are the film’s unintentionally humorous efforts to attain a PG-13 rating. This lion must have read some books about anatomy or something because it is downright surgical in dispatching its enemies. One might think that the victim of a lion attack would be mauled and chewed-up, but no, this lion neatly cuts its victims throats. At one point our characters come upon a village where every inhabitant has been killed by the lion, but there is remarkably no blood. None of the victims are noticeably dismembered or disfigured. They just look like they were killed by an efficient serial killer, like this lion does home invasions in his spare time. Granted, my doctorate isn’t in lionology (although I dabble), but I don’t think that’s how fucking lions work. The film actually kind of tries to explain this by giving the lion a motive (his family was killed by poachers and he’s out for revenge), making the lion a sort of feline Liam Neeson. That should add to the entertainment value considering how ridiculous it is. Jaws: The Revenge and Orca have similar premises and are far more entertaining than this because they fully embrace their nonsense and do so in an R-rated fashion. A lion reenacting Death Wish shouldn’t be this goddam boring.
Beyond the absurdity and cartoonish of the threat, Beast’s script is loaded with frustrating issues. It is common for characters in horror movies to do dumb things, and it is often necessary to move the plot forward, but these characters are just bafflingly stupid. This is particularly true of the daughters, who will wonder off on their own for no reason and will get out of a car when they see a charging lion approaching. This lion either felt incredibly lucky or had mixed feelings because of his prey’s apparent death wish. It also never occurs to anyone in the fucking African outback to bring a frigging gun with them, probably because that bit of common sense would have drastically decreased the film’s running time. This is also one of those movies that tells you early on how the villain is going to be killed. It isn’t subtle, either, like in Jaws. This just obviously tells you the ending and then you have to wait another 90 minutes for it to happen. Riveting.
I actually didn’t hate this movie as much as this review would imply, but I can’t think of much to say in the way of positives. Idris Elba is as great as usual and the cinematography is nice. I wasn’t angry while watching it. But there is nothing here to justify this film’s existence. Beast isn’t scary or fun and it isn’t unintentionally stupid enough to be funny (although the massacred villagers comes close). It’s just something to be forgotten.
P.S. Just after posting this review, I discovered that this movie is R-rated and…. just wow. R-rated for what? There isn’t a drop of blood in this entire frigging movie. Amazing to think that Jaws was rated PG (albeit before the PG-13 existed) and this is now considered an R. I take back my comment that this movie made concessions to get a PG-13, as apparently it was intended as an R and is just absurdly tame.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beast_(2022_American_film)#/media/File:Beast_2022_American_poster.jpg
