Beast Offers Solid Late-Summer Thrills

M e: “Remember, dear, I’m taking my dad to a movie screening tonight.”

The Wife: “Oh, right. What movie?”

Me: “Beast. It’s Idris Elba vs. a rampaging lion.”

The Wife: “Tell your dad he’s sitting this one out — I’m going.”

The Wife was kidding — mostly. I mention the exchange because it highlights the excellent casting here. Idris Elba is one of very few stars working today to whom the old tag “Women want him, men want to be him” could be reasonably applied. (It’s probably more reasonable than calling him a proper star; things looked pretty promising during the Thor/Prometheus/Pacific Rim/Mandela/Beasts of No Nation run. But the fire seems to have cooled a bit since then, Bond rumors or no Bond rumors.) The trailer made it clear that he would play a father trying to reconnect with his daughters after the death of their mother (swoon), and also that he was going to engage an actual lion in hand-to-hand combat, armed only with a knife (cheer). Something for everyone. Well, maybe not the kiddies; the Powers That Be knew better than to tame a man-vs.-lion movie into something PG-13.

I ended up going to the screening with Dad, and I’m glad I did, because on the way home he compared it to the 1968 western The Stalking Moon, in which retiring Army scout Gregory Peck contends with the deadly, titular Apache warrior. (With the obvious — and important — difference that one features a human antagonist and the other an animal.) Dad recalled that Stalking Moon had some just cause for his violent pursuit, such that, while his heart was with Peck’s defense of his own, he never stopped sympathizing with the relentless hunter.

At the outset, it looks like Beast is going to be a similar sort of story. The opening scene depicts a nighttime ambush leading to wholesale slaughter, but it’s the lions that are getting killed, and illegal poachers doing the killing. “The whole pride but one,” notes the leader. “Get him or he’ll come after us.” The hunters set out to finish the job, and no one is sad when the camera pans down to reveal a massive paw print, then pans up to reveal a missing man. They took everything from him. Now, one man — er, lion — is going to show them what happens . . . when they unleash the Beast.

It’s a bit anthropomorphic, but I would have preferred it to what we got instead. The lion isn’t a character here; heck, it isn’t even a lion. It’s just embodied savage violence, alternately supernatural — appearing and disappearing on the scene as needed — and sub-natural, unable to do lion-y things like smell the blood of a wounded man from just a few feet away. I’m okay with the notion that it starts killing without eating its prey because people messed with the natural order (male lions exist to protect the pride) and so they’re reaping an unnatural result. I’m less okay with the notion that it veers from unstoppable killing machine to critter you can contend with, depending on who’s doing the contending. I don’t set out to nitpick that sort of stuff, but I do notice when I get knocked out of my engagement with the action.

Right — the action. As served up by director Baltasar Kormákur (2 Guns, Everest), it’s pretty good, particularly during the lion’s first attack on our hero as he cowers under an SUV, all heaving head and yawning jaws and huge claws scrabbling forward, looking for something soft to pierce. And loving attention has been lavished upon rendering the beast’s guttural growls and roars; all rumble and no yowl, echoing up from the depths. And despite its lapses in the smell department, it’s an animal we get on-screen, and not just a lion-shaped monster.

But as I say, the lion is not a character. Elba’s Dr. Nate Samuels is a character, a grieving man who knows he may lose his daughters too, unless he can heal the breach brought on by his familial failings and his wife’s death. Older daughter Meredith (Iyana Halley)  — or “just Mer,” as she would have it — bristles with resentment over attention not paid and promises broken, while the younger Norah (Leah Jeffries) is, more simply, sad. So he’s brought them to where it all began: South Africa, where he met their mother and where his old friend Martin (Sharlto Copley) manages a game preserve. During an arrival-night drinking bout with Martin, Nate lets us know he’s on the hook: a doctor who missed his wife’s cancer, a husband who took his time fixing his marriage, a father who neglected attending to his children. Here is where he has to begin again and do better, before it’s too late. He may be played by Idris Elba, but the look of drunken, helpless dismay in his eyes as he surveys the mess he’s made of his life is pure Everyman.

The film does a good job of taking its time to set up the action. The next morning, the foursome sets out in the lovely, low morning light to tour the preserve. There’s a stop to admire the pride that Martin helped raise up, some talk of the poachers who have added lions to their kill list, a nod to the abandoned schoolhouse that once served the region, and then, the discovery of an ominously silent village. (Here and elsewhere, Kormákur plays horror director, letting his camera follow characters through maze-like spaces that disorient the viewer and add to the sense of frightened confusion.) Soon after, it proves very fortunate that Samuels knows a thing or two about emergency surgery.

What follows is a solid set of escalating encounters, all leading up to the moment when Dad has to make one more promise and ask for his daughters’ trust as he launches a desperate gambit. I would rather he’d told them that he couldn’t promise anything, given the circumstances, but that he would do his very best. By then, they’d seen enough of nature red in tooth and claw that they didn’t need the illusion of guaranteed safety. I would also rather that the story had ended differently, for reasons that it would give too much away to explain. But overall, Beast was good enough, gripping enough, and engaging enough that hashing out just how it might have ended, and how the various narrative threads might have been better tied up, made for good conversation with Dad — including that bit about The Stalking Moon.