'Beast' is mostly what you think and almost what you want
Yes, a lot of people (including me) will smile when seeing a teenage character wearing a “Jurassic Park” shirt. All of them, however, will groan when realizing that “Beast” not only bites a lot of its structure and a hugely memorable action sequence but—spoiler alert, not like it’s a surprise—THE BIG ACTION CLIMAX AS WELL. That isn’t a costume designer being playful, that is straight-up trolling a movie that opens pretty well and loses most of its goodwill by the end.
The wearer of said movie promotion is Mare (Iyana Halley), who with her younger sister Norah (Leah Jeffries) and dad Nate (Idris Elba) travels to a very remote African savanna to visit their Uncle Martin (Sharlto Copley) and get close to animals like gazelle and giraffe and semi-close to a whole bunch of lions. The only problem, as it turns out, is that one particular lion is understandably furious about poachers killing the rest of his pride and takes out his sadness and anger on any human he sees, assuming guilt all-around rather than stopping to ask. King of the Jungle is not King of Fact-Checking.
For a while, the relatively achievable premise of “scared people desperately try to evade ferocious animal” works well enough, with Elba, Halley and Jeffries effectively capturing the dynamics within their family both before and after the loss of the girls’ mother. And the escalation of terror is genuinely exciting until the movie bogs down in CGI absurdity instead of reasonably credible survival. Director Baltasar Kormakur (“Everest,” “2 Guns,” “Contraband”) was the wrong choice, struggling to maintain momentum and intimacy when the movie needs to find a new gear. “Beast” needed to be played close the whole way but instead resorts to moments that are either gruesome, barely visible or both, and the thin script by Ryan Engle (“Non-Stop,” “The Commuter”) is likewise guilty in making this 90 minutes feel longer.
It results in a bit of a low-risk, low-reward movie, not saying anything profound or capturing anything unique but getting the job done long enough, ish, if you just want to see Idris Elba try to evade a lion. Bonus points if you wanted that before you even knew about “Beast.”
C+
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