The film is a tense thriller in the vein of Crawl or The Shallows, but while there is much about it that sticks to the style of similar films, there are also a number of points where the film veers off and loses logic quickly.
5 The Serious Tone
Beast didn’t take cues from similar thrillers that treat themselves as more of a rollercoaster ride than a film. Underwater and Crawl are two strong examples from the past few years that have pitted their stars against dangerous creatures and improbable odds without worrying much about backstory or serious character development. They also dove further into the sci-fi genre with the action-thriller. However, Beast focused far more on the backstory of Elba’s character, including the loss of his wife and attempts to rise to the occasion as the father he needs to be now.
This left the film, with a runtime of only 93 minutes, dealing with a lot of baggage and a serious tone that didn’t fit with the expected tense thriller. Indeed, the tone varies wildly from tension-ramping moments in fights against the lion to a sudden dry, serious conversation or argument between Idris Elba and his kids. This likely came from the director, Baltasar Kormakur, who often builds these dramatic, overly serious films and has worked on darker television like the Icelandic Trapped series in the past. This bled into Beast, even though the premise of the film shouldn’t fit that style at all.
4 The Dream Sequences
There were several dream sequences in the film, running from the very beginning to the very end, where Idris Elba is walking in first-person through a village, looking for his wife. He eventually finds her and appears to be embracing her as he accepts his own death, only to immediately wake up in the hospital and find that he has survived.
The choice to include these sequences was bizarre and blurred the lines of Elba’s character between the grief for his wife and the new responsibilities as a single father too much. He’d just had a triumphant moment protecting his children and outsmarting the lion, and then the scene moved to this traumatic moment of grief at the climax of the film. It didn’t feel like a well-informed choice, and the sequences felt completely out of place in the midst of the lion fighting.
3 The Broken Car Window
Early in the film when the lion first attacks, one of the front windows in the car that the family remains trapped in for most of the runtime is broken. At first, the lion tries attacking through the window to get at the family, and much later in the film tries to get them through that window again. No attempt is ever made by the characters to seal this huge breach in their defenses except to move away from the broken window when the lion attacks.
This was a bizarre choice, as the characters even slept in the seat next to the broken window while nobody was awake and keeping an eye out for the lion. This raises many questions about why the lion sat and watched them for so long when he could likely have gotten into the car through the window, and why the characters felt safe sleeping right next to it. None of this helped the film scream classic action movie.
2 The Dead Village
No matter how devastating or terrifying a lion is, there should be no chance of an entire village being caught off-guard and mauled to death by it. Early in the film, the foursome heads to a village to investigate the nearby poaching and finds everybody dead. While it is mentioned that some women and children might have escaped, the bodies are found strewn across the village and no clear attempt was made to attack the lion.
No matter how ferocious a beast is, a large group of people with any kind of weapons should have been able to chase off or kill the creature. It is ridiculous and makes no sense that the lion was able to enact this level of devastation without sustaining any apparent injuries.
1 The Lion Surviving So Long
And that brings up another excellent point. The lion is insinuated to possibly be some sort of devil or hugely motivated beast because his pride was killed by poachers. But his enduring survival is simply ridiculous. From being hardly affected by a tranquilizer to walking away from a fiery car crash down a hill with only minor wounds, the lion is able to take an insane level of punishment which should scare it off eventually.
Idris Elba takes many brutal injuries from the lion over the course of the film, but his survival and ferocity are based on protecting his children. The lion is fighting for nothing but to continue a nonsensical killing spree and should have walked away after sustaining half the injuries inflicted upon it over the course of the film.
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