Written by Ryan Engle
Directed by Baltasar Kormákur
Starring Idris Elba, Sharlto Copley, Iyana Halley and Leah Jeffries
Iceland/South Africa/USA, 2022
On a family trip to South Africa, a widowed father (Idris Elba) must protect his two daughters (Iyana Halley and Leah Savanas Jeffries) when they run afoul of a deadly lion. The family's not on the best of terms, as the father left the mother shortly before it turned out she had cancer and died. So he has to not only fight lions but also make his daughters love him again. Luckily he's got a family friend on his side who is also an expert on all things South Africa (Sharlto Copley). Unluckily, the lions kill him.
The pros: the movie is refreshingly simple, straight forward, to the point and mercifully short. That's a lot more than can be said for a lot of what passes for multiplex entertainment today, so I appreciated it for that. Elba's great as always and so is Copley, though I wish he would have popped up Richard Dreyfuss-in-JAWS-style at the end to tell everyone he was okay.
The cons: the special effects leave a little to be desired. JURASSIC PARK with lions, this is not. I don't know if more practical effects would have helped or if mixing in more footage of real lions might have done the trick, or maybe even if they just spent more time on the CGI. Not sure. It's not laughably bad or anything, it's just less suspenseful when you can tell they're fighting a computer generated lion.
The movie pits poachers against regular people against lions, and at one point it had me thinking maybe the poachers had it right. I mean if the lion's going to eat this family, isn't it good to shoot it? But then I remembered it only wants to kill everyone because the poachers killed its family in the first place. So, I guess the poachers drew first blood. Although, now that I think of it, even if they hadn't, isn't a lion just being a lion? It's not the lion's fault if he happens to eat the main characters of a movie, is it? How's he supposed to know? He's a lion.
Well, these deep philosophical questions are never answered, but Elba does take the lion on in a one-on-one wrestling match in the end, so there's that, at least.
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