Review: Beast

Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Baltasar Kormakur's "Beast" is a moderately well-made thriller with some some stunning scenery and a few well-placed jump scares, but it falls somewhere in the middle on the scale of man vs. nature horror movies. It's more on the level of "Grizzly" than "Jaws."

The picture takes the unusual step of making its ferocious villain - a gigantic, CGI lion on a killing spree - sympathetic in an opening sequence during which a group of poachers wipe out the lion's entire pride, causing the killer lion to immediately seek vengeance against not only poachers, but basically anything that walks upright on two legs.

Meanwhile, we get one of the type of human interest stories at the center of the plot that you'd expect to find in a film of this sort. Dr. Nate Samuels (Idris Elba) brings his two daughters to Africa for a trip to reconnect with their mother's homeland. Their mother and father had separated, and Nate still feels guilty that shortly after their breakup, his ex-wife had been diagnosed with cancer and died.

As a result, his older daughter, Meredith (Iyana Halley), seems to bear a grudge against her father, while her sister, Norah (Leah Jeffries), seems to want to tread lightly around everyone. After having arrived in Africa, they meet up with Martin (Sharlto Copley), an old family friend who had introduced Nate to his wife, now works to protect the animals in the area and is an enemy of the poachers.

Just shortly after these four take a trip into the wild to watch a pride of lions go about their business, they stumble upon a village in which the entire population has been wiped out. They quickly discover the source - the massive, angry lion whose pride was killed in the beginning of the picture. Much of the rest of the movie is set within a Jeep where Nate and his family try to fend off the lion, while Martin - who is injured - tries to make it back to the vehicle.

Later, not surprisingly, the poachers show back up - and it's amusing how the lion is able to take out an entire group of men with machine guns. "Beast" is not a film that is exactly striving for realism - and yes, there is a scene in which Elba punches a lion. 

The whole man vs. nature horror movie has been done to death over the years - we've seen man vs. shark, man vs. piranha, man vs. crocodile, man vs. grizzly, man vs. giant rabbits (if you haven't seen "Night of the Lepus," well, you don't know what you're missing), man vs. snakes on a plane and... you get the picture - and only a few of these have been memorable, at least, in a good way. 

"Beast" is a pretty standard entry into this subgenre. It's not bad, but it's pretty by-the-book - although it's finale, which you can probably see from a mile away, is a satisfactory way of ending it. Elba's presence is always a pleasure, whether he's portraying Stringer Bell, Nelson Mandela or, ahem, a man punching a killer lion.