Beast (Kormákur, 2022)

It is telling, ironic,, or both, that none of the publicity stills provided by Universal in the press kit for Beast showed the titular animal that is trying to wreak vengeance on Dr. Nate Samuels (Idris Elba) and his family. Given that one of Samuels’ daughters wears a Jurassic Park t-shirt and the film subsequently features a set piece where said animal terrorizes the occupants of a motor vehicle hanging over a cliff, I supposed I can be forgiven for recycling Roger Ebert’s famous response to Jaws 4: The Revenge — what beast wouldn’t want to take vengeance on the extended family of the man who killed it?

Beast has the bare minimum as far as a frame story. Samuels is trying to reconnect with his daughters who are mad at him for leaving his wife (their mother) before she died of cancer. We get a scene with a guide outlining the pride behavior of lions (mothers hunt, fathers protect the pack), and off we go.

Good (perhaps great if you count Jaws and Jurassic Park) movies have been fashioned from less, but Beast has neither the awe of the dinosaur movie nor the skillful pacing and editing of the shark movie. There’s a lot of peering into the jungle and glimpses of the predator in the background as characters in the foreground are looking the other way.

In some ways, Beast suffers from the same problem as Fall — it doesn’t have the creative ability to solve its own puzzle. So rather than admire the characters for their ingenuity or bravery, we simply wait for necessity to compel them to cross their fingers and hope that taking a risk will work because they have no other options. Yet even those moments are surprisingly void of pathos. If we believed these characters were actual human beings in this situation, me might feel admiration in their courage at facing some primal fear. But we know this is not the sort of movie where the kids are going to get eaten and the hero has to last until the end, so it because a random and rather depressing collection of jump-cut scares.

There’s a subplot involving an Internet rumor that “anti-poachers” kill poachers that doesn’t quite go anywhere. In fact, I learned more about poaching from the documentary Trophy than I did here. Given that Samuels’ wife is supposed to have been from this village, one might expect that the film would use the setting to at least gesture at the theme of an American stripped of his privilege and learning to value what he has by being forced to fight for his survival.

Hmmm, maybe his daughter should have been wearing a Purge t-shirt instead.