Beast offers a double dose of Idris Elba at the cinema this week. But between the fantastic tale of George Miller and the laughable survival of Baltasar Kormákur, the gap is wide.
Beast sheds light on another part of Idris Elba’s filmography. An underground filmography strewn with many turnips, very far from the Beasts of No Nation whose title is close to the survival of Baltasar Kormákur. Charismatic actor, revealed on the small screen with The Office and especially Lutherdreamed and fantasized in the costume of James Bond, however, we sometimes forget to mention a certain bad taste of the actor who found himself stuck in a number of nevertheless memorable turnips. Ghost Rider 2, Cats, The Dark Tower, Bastille Day thus rub shoulders The Great Game, The Harder They Fall, american gangster where 28 weeks later. A jagged filmography, perfectly illustrated on the same Wednesday when Three thousand years waiting for you and this Beast.
Idris he fights
Beast is therefore directed by Baltasar Kormákur, an Icelandic actor, screenwriter, producer and director who has been working in Hollywood since 2005. Capable of the worst with 2 Gunsas the friendliest and most honest entertainment with Everest and Smuggling, it’s hard to find any consistency in the filmography of a man who seems to go where the wind (or indeed the dollars) take him. Beast follows Dr. Nate Samuels, recently widower and father of two daughters, holidaymakers in South Africa who have gone to find a great biologist friend there (always a pleasure to find Sharlto Copley) to go on a safari in a nature reserve. Too bad for them: a lion drunk with revenge and thirsty for blood rages on this same reserve after seeing his tribe decimated by poachers.
Needless to dedicate an entire paragraph to the scenario, it is obviously never really the main interest of this kind of exercise, offering above all an ideal playground for seasoned directors. Unfortunately, Baltasar Kormakur not being one, the tension will be reduced to a union minimum, interspersed with laughable family exchanges on mourning and guilt, obviously interspersed with flashbacks, killing one by one all the promises of the lowest end of survival. In the end, there is not much left in front of this race for stupidity drowned in clichés ending happily, in the most laughable way possible. Spoilers: yes, you’re not dreaming: Idris Elba is going to fight with his bare hands against a lion.
Dumb and idiots
Baltasar Kormakur thus never feels at ease, whether locked up in a 4*4 or even on a small plot of nature reserve. The director thus never manages to hide the stupidity of a scenario, which, in spite of a very successful lion, which he nevertheless tries to avoid as much as possible, unfortunately seems to be the only quality of this Beast. When there are only 30 short minutes left in the film to conclude and the threat finally seems to have been overcome, the film goes through a long moment of hesitation, which even before a reversal of the scenario as big as the paws of the lion, confronts Baltasar Kormakur to the interstellar void that he knew how to confer on his unbearable characters. Staying alone with them, without a lion, for almost half an hour thus seems like torture.
Fortunately, when Idris Elba decides to muster his courage in both hands to restore some interest to a film that has absolutely none, to offer us, even for a few minutes, a scene that lives up to our expectations which no longer amounts to much at the end of the footage. Did it just need a good director? Is Beast was simply a bad idea? Did Idris Elba see Beast as a spiritual sequel to Cats ? So many questions that will unfortunately remain unanswered in the face of this great empty parenthesis, where the stupidest are not necessarily those we believe.
Beast was released on August 24, 2022.
Notice
4.0
Dumb and idiots
Beast has nothing to offer but its handsome digital lion. Too bad when Baltasar Kormákur tries to avoid it, neither comfortable with survival, behind closed doors, and even less the family drama with laughable dialogues punctuated by its inevitable falsely dreamlike flashbacks. We will not blame the director, who if he could have surpassed a scenario and weak characters, could have drawn a minimum of tension.