Beast

Dr. Nate Samuels (Elba), whose estranged wife has just died, takes his two teen daughters to South Africa to where their mother grew up. The girls, Mere (Halley) and Norah (Jeffries), aren’t particularly happy with their dad right now. They feel he abandoned them and their mom while she was dying of cancer. Nate believes the trip will bring the girls closer to him and their mother with this visit to her homeland. Uncle Martin (Copley) is there to greet him. He grew up with Samuels’ wife and is a lifelong friend. Martin is going to give them a “behind-the-scenes” look at the game reserve he runs. Sounds a bit familiar, right?

Beast is like a throwback to the good old days of Jaws rip-offs and the “when animals attack” movies. Now, I adore those movies; Grizzly and Day of the Animals from William Girdler, any number of Bigfoot movies like Night of the Demon, and one of my favorites of all time, Joe Dante’s Piranha. So Beast is basically Jaws on safari.

The story isn’t particularly strong here. There’s the requisite exposition dump in the first 20 minutes and then it’s off to the races as the actors do what they can with what they’ve been given. Both Halley and Jeffries manage to hold their own against Elba. I feel like Elba is one of the best working actors we have, and I’d love to see him be given something more along the lines of Luther, his excellent TV show from the last decade, but director Kormákur (Everest, Adrift) doesn’t do anything particularly special here. This could’ve easily been made as a 1970s TV movie like Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell.

Beast can be rather upsetting. Weird because, although we know the main lion is CGI, it was still distressing to see the lion being hurt in multiple different ways. I don’t get upset during the movies mentioned above, so I think it boils down to I just really love cats. The film does bring a focus on poachers and the decimation of the wild animals in Africa. It’s a serious problem and really, can you blame the animals for fighting back?

At no point does Beast hide what it wants to accomplish. They made a movie that stars an actor everyone loves and pits him against a bigass enraged lion. I mean, who doesn’t want to see Idris Elba punching lions? In the end, does it really matter how good the movie is if the main objective is to see Elba literally fight a lion? The answer, for me anyway, is no.