Idris elba

Beast is, the blurb tells us, a ‘pulse-pounding thriller about a father and his daughters who find themselves hunted by a massive rogue lion intent on proving that the savannah has but one apex predator’. Whether this was ever intended to be a serious film, I cannot say, but it’s fun in its schlocky, gory, silly way, doesn’t outstay its welcome (it’s barely 90 minutes) and will satisfy anyone who has ever yearned to see Idris Elba wrestle a lion and then punch it full in the face. Not my dream especially, but each to their own. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Let’s get one thing out of the way up front: yes, Idris Elba punches a lion in this movie, and yes, that part’s pretty great. If only the rest of Beast reached those heights. Director Baltasar Kormákur (no stranger to survival thrillers, after previously helming Everest and Adrift) has put together a late-summer actioner that’s entertaining enough, but probably a little too tame for its own good. Following the unexpected loss of his wife to cancer, American doctor Nate Daniels (Elba) brings his two daughters Mer (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Jeffries) into the African bush to visit Nate’s old friend Martin (Sharlto Copley, in full great-white-hunter mode).

Yardie is Idris Elba’s first film as a director and what I have to say isn’t what I wanted to say at all. I love Elba and wanted this to be terrific. I wanted him to be as good from behind as he is from the front, so to speak. I wanted this to absolutely smash it as a narrative about the Jamaican-British experience as there have been so few. But, alas, it is a disappointment. It is patchy. It’s not paced excitingly. The characters are insufficiently drawn. And I struggled with the thick Jamaican patois, I must confess. I was often muddled, yet whether it was due to that or the plot was muddled anyway, I cannot say for sure. This is based on Victory Headley’s cult novel, first published in 1992, and is set in Jamaica and then London in the early 1980s.