FILM REVIEW: BEAST (15) ESP RATING: 2.5/5

Aug 31, 20222 min read

This survival thriller tries hard to bellow a mighty roar – but ultimately ends up whimpering to the same formulaic sub-genre beats.

Which isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world as this ninety-minute fear-inducing drama doesn’t outstay its welcome with a modicum of entertainment – but it simply never has a prolonged bite.

And it intermittently pushes the boundaries of reality as a killer lion tries to do for ‘land’ what great white sharks do for ‘water’ – but generally peters out to be as stereotypical as many that have come before. It’s arguably not even as good as the 1996 Michael Douglas/Val Kilmer-starring ‘guilty pleasure’ The Ghost and the Darkness.

Idris Elba, who seems to be everywhere at the moment – see this week’s new release Three Thousand Years of Longing, and Booking.com adverts – plays the ‘scarred’ father of two daughters, trying to re-connect with them on a safari to South Africa.

Having split up with their mother a year or so earlier – who then subsequently died of terminal cancer – Elba’s Dr Nate Samuels heads to the Mopani Reserve to see his old wildlife biologist friend Martin (District 9 and The A-Team star Sharlto Copley), with eldest Meredith (Iyana Halley) and youngest Norah (Leah Sava Jeffries) in tow.

But unbeknown to them, poachers have been rife in the area and killed off an entire lion pride – bar one massive vengeful rogue Male intent on slaughtering the local human populace for retribution. And when the party of four come across a slaughtered village, they soon come into the crosshairs of the blood-thirsty lion, and have to fight for their lives inside a wrecked vehicle with no immediate help on the horizon.

For the most part Beast kind of works with the ‘low bar’ of previous animal-killer thrillers – with an impressively-rendered computer-generated lion giving a handful of genuine scares – as a yardstick. But it does end of up a little preposterous by the close when Nate starts throwing fists – he easily should have been ripped apart multiple times before – as reality is stretched by Everest director Baltasar Kormakur.

And the ‘daughters blaming their father for not being there’ side-story is a predictably uneventful tag-on.

But as a brief cinematic distraction, Beast shows its claws of intent once or twice – without leaving any impactful imprints on your brain once you leave the theatre.

ESP Rating: 2.5/5

Gavin Miller