“Beast,” a new nature-gone-wild flick starring Idris Elba and a big, angry CGI lion, and now playing in theatres, is a throwback to man vs. beast movies like “Jaws” and “Anaconda.” “I’ve never seen anything like this,” says wildlife biologist Martin Battles (Sharlto Copely). “Multiple attacks, without eating its prey. Lions don’t do that. At least no lion I’ve ever seen.”
Elba is Dr. Nate Samuels, a recently widowed father of two teenage daughters, Meredith (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Jeffries). In an attempt to reconnect with his kids, he arranges a holiday to a South African wildlife reserve, run by Battles, a childhood friend of his late wife.
Daniels met his wife in South Africa, and, although he was separated from her when she passed, he wants his daughters to connect to their mother’s homeland.
The trip is idyllic until they arrive at a village that has been devastated by a gruesome lion attack. Soon, they meet the culprit, a wrathful male lion who regards all humans as enemies after his pride was wiped out by poachers. The lion is now fighting back.
“It’s the law of the jungle,” says Battles. “It’s the only law that matters.”
Elba hasn’t had great luck with felines on screen (see “Cats”), and faster than you can say, “Old Deuteronomy,” Samuels and family are engaged in a horrifying fight for their lives.
“It’s you against him,” says Battles, “and that is not a fight you are designed to win.”
As a thriller “Beast” is so predictable the subtitle could have been “Maul’s Well that Ends Well.” Nonetheless, Icelandic director Kormákur does stage a few straightforward action scenes in long takes that will make your blood pressure rise. The fight sequences in and around the jeep the main cast spends most of the film in, are claustrophobic and primal, with a real sense of danger.
Screenwriter Ryan Engle attempts to weave some father-daughter dynamics into the story, but we’re not here for the dysfunctional family stuff. We’re paying top dollar to see Idris Elba punch a lion in the face (before you @ me, these are CGI creations, no animal’s pride was harmed in the making of this movie) and so he does in fine b-movie style.
“The Ghost and the Darkness” this ain’t.
Between lion attacks, the silence is filled with a variety of dialogue that ranges from, “You stay right here,” to “We’ve gotta get out of here.” Elba does bring some emotive qualities to this action character, while Copely lends the story some grit. As the sisters, Halley and Jeffries bring a mix of steeliness and empathy. There is more to them than being scream queens on the Savannah.
“Beast” is not an ambitious film. It doesn’t have to be. It has Elba and enough angry animal action to make its 90 minutes fly by in the swipe of a lion’s paw.
For film fans “Beast” will seem both familiar and unsettlingly surprising, sometimes in the same scene. Cinemaniacs will recognize the story’s backbone, a woman who finds love with a serial killer, as echoes of films like “Badlands” and “Kalifornia.” What they may not expect is the nervy filmmaking and unexpected twists from first-time director Michael Pearce.
Loosely based on 1960s era serial sex offender Edward Paisnel, “Beast’s” dark story is set in a small community on the sun-dappled Jersey Islands. In recent weeks three teens have been killed and a fourth is missing from the tight-knit local town.
Twenty-seven-year old Moll (Jessie Buckley) lives at home, very much under the thumb of her controlling mother (Geraldine James). Troubled by an act of violence in her past she old rebels on the night of her birthday party, sneaking out to go dancing in town. On the way home she is assaulted by a guy she met at the dance but is rescued by Pascal (Johnny Flynn) who scares off the attacker with a hunting rifle. He drives her home and the two forge a bond. In Pascal she finds someone unlike anyone she has ever met. Just as they move in together he becomes the prime suspect in the local murders, forcing Moll to choose between the family she has always known and the man she loves. “Are you protecting Pascal because you think he’s innocent,” asks a police officer, “or are you doing it as another way to get even with the world?“
We’ve seen bad-boys-and-the-women-who-love-them stories before, but “Beast” is set apart by the dynamics of the relationship between Moll and Pascal. The star-crossed pair have chemistry to burn and, as far as the violence goes, suffice to say the beastly behaviour here is gender nonspecific.
The journey to the film’s dark heart is a tense one, packed with interesting character work from the ensemble cast and bleak thrills but it wouldn’t work without the leads performance. Buckley is a revelation. In her hands Moll is complex, fighting against any kind of outside control, from her family, the police, the community or even Pascal. Disturbed and disturbing, we rarely see a character simultaneously embody so much ferocity and ambiguity.
“Beast” deals in opacity. Less interested in the murders than the atmosphere they create in Moll and Pascal’s lives and the community as a whole, it’s a throwback to the psychological thrillers of Nicolas Roeg where interesting human behaviour and foreboding atmosphere trumps all.
“Hope for the best,” says Hank McCoy a.k.a. Beast (Nicholas Hoult) midway through “X-Men: Apocalypse,“ “but prepare for the worst.”
That’s the way I approach the X-Men movies. When a movie series spans a universe of stories—in addition to five X-Men flicks, this is the third “First Class” movie—caution is advised. The general rule of thumb is one of diminishing returns: the further away from the source, the weaker the story.
“Apocalypse” isn’t exactly the best of the X-Men movies, but it’s hardly the worst either. What it lacks in surprises, it makes up for in bombast.
“A gift can often be a curse,” we’re told in the opening narration. “Give them the greatest gift of all, power beyond imagination and they think they should rule the world.” Such is the case with En Sabah Nur (Oscar Isaac) an immortal Egyptian pharaoh betrayed a millennium or two ago, left in a fitful slumber under the rubble of a collapsed pyramid.
Cut to the early 1980s. Series regulars Magneto (Michael Fassbender), Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee), Angel (Ben Hardy) and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) are going about life as usual… or as usual as they can while shape shifting and instantly transporting from place to place.
Their lives intersect again when En Sabah Nur, now nicknamed Apocalypse (no foreshadowing there) emerges from his sleep, eager to take his place as king of the world. The mutant god absorbs television news to learn about the modern world before assembling his disciples—his four horsemen—and unlocking the one last power he needs to control the planet. With the world’s fate resting in his hands Professor X (James McAvoy) brings a team of X-Men to do battle.
The first X-Men movies were allegories for all manner of twentieth century intolerance but gradually over time the civil rights elements of the story have become more lip service than social comment. “Apocalypse” distances itself even further from the core of what made the originals interesting, leaving behind a serviceable action movie that plays more like a Successories unleash-your-power platitude than a cry for universal liberties.
Instead we are given a villain who melodramatically says things like, “Come! Rescue your weakling!” and a CGI climax that feels lifted from “Batman v. Superman” or “Age of Ultron.” The dumbed down story of friendship and teamwork may not engage the brain but it does, however, have outlandish visuals to dazzle the eye. A show stopping Quicksilver (Evan Peters) scene has the faster-than-light mutant rescue a dozen people from a bombed out building, frozen in time by his supersonic speed. It’s cool and like the movie’s best images has the verve and invention the script lacks.
When the film’s biggest reveal is James McAvoy’s bald Professor X head you know the movie is light on new ideas but “X-Men: Apocalypse“ transcends the law of diminishing rewards by upping the action.
