Idris stars but CGI lion is mane attraction
Beast
(R13, 93 mins)
Directed by Baltasar Kormakur Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★ 1⁄
2
There’s a legend that people who work in swish restaurants eat baked beans when they get home, because all they want after work is something simple and predictable to fall asleep on.
Which might explain why, after the New Zealand International Film Festival wrapped its Wellington season, the first thing I watched on Netflix was Rampage.
Or, it may be that I was sick as a parrot and full of paracetamol and Jameson’s.
Anyway, Rampage turned out to exactly the load of laughable rubbish I was hoping for, with Dwayne Johnson battling giant fauna and shady bureaucrats while throwing out oneliners and reconciling his issues.
So when I was watching Beast in Wellington this week, I wondered why the credit ‘‘screenplay by Ryan Engle’’ was familiar, when I realised: Engle also wrote Rampage. And that’s maybe a clue to why Beast really isn’t working.
This rogue-lion melodrama either needs to be a whole lot smarter and not hang its plot on people acting in idiotic ways, or it needs to embrace the stupid and stop trying to be a good film.
Idris Elba takes the lead. He’s a slightly exasperated dad who has taken his two teenage daughters to South Africa, specifically the village their mother was born in before she travelled to the United
States as a student and met the hunky Dr Id. After a woefully extended opening stanza – this is a film that takes half an hour to introduce four characters and a crisis – we finally catch sight of the main attraction.
And the lion in Beast is impressive. Ever since Leo DiCaprio got mugged by mama bear in The Revenant, I’ve had no problem with CGI beasties. And the lions in Beast are seamless.
Idris keeps himself manically busy – driving, sewing up arteries, hiding up trees – in a way that almost hides the fact that none of this makes any sense.
Beast is a film in which people repeatedly tell each other there is a maneating lion close by – and then wander off alone and unarmed to look for it. Or, even better, in which people in a car being attacked by that lion forget to wind the fricking window up.
At this point I remembered there was no-one else in the cinema and I was free to start swearing and laughing out loud at the screen.
Listen, Idris is great and Sharlto Copley (District 9) is who he always is, as the token white South African dude. Iyana Halley and Leah Jeffries are both fine as daughters Mere and Norah, despite a script that does them no favours.
Baltasar Kormakur (Everest) tries to make Beast two films and ends up with neither. Beast takes itself too seriously to be much fun. But if you take it seriously for a second, all you will see are the holes and contrivances.
Beast is screening in cinemas nationwide.