It’s not exactly 1917 but it’s refreshing to see a piece of pulp such as this squeezed so carefully, involving us in the horror of it rather than leaving us at a distance.Īt a tight 93 minutes, the pace barely has time to slacken and despite the familiar family soap setup, Ryan Engle’s efficiently spare and mostly grounded script doesn’t get bogged down by maudlin monologuing. There’s a string of intricate, if often cheated, “oners”, swirling tracking shots that take us in and around characters and locations in ways we don’t expect. The Icelandic film-maker Baltasar Kormákur, no stranger to meat and potatoes action movies having made Contraband, 2 Guns and Adrift, is keen to do more than just point and shoot and together with the Oscar-winning cinematographer Philippe Rousselot (whose illustrious career includes films such as Dangerous Liaisons, Interview with the Vampire and Big Fish), they add surprising finesse to straightforward action sequences. But after some mercifully brief exposition, things go even further south when the group comes into contact with a particularly aggrieved lion.īeast isn’t going anywhere you can’t predict from the trailer or even a simple logline but it’s a straight line confidently drawn, directed with more flair that one often gets from such material. He’s taking daughters Norah (Leah Sava Jeffries) and “Mer” (Iyana Halley) away to remember their late mother in her homeland, meeting up with an old friend, wildlife biologist Martin (Sharlto Copley). Like in the underrated 2017 adventure The Mountain Between Us, he’s hugely believable in hyper-competent, high-stakes survival mode and here, he’s forced to figure a way out of a nightmarish trap when a South African vacation goes horribly wrong. Despite Elba’s prolific nature, it’s still rare for him to take the lead (he’s usually within an ensemble or sharing top billing) and Beast awards him ample screen-time to show us why he deserves more of it. Like 2019’s slick summer surprise Crawl, it’s another to-the-point R-rated creature feature, light on plot and heavy on thrills, and this time it’s a lion doing the stalking and Idris Elba doing the trying not to die. Williams’ work was essential to the changing opinions of Disney moving towards computer animation, and with his first film with Netflix, it seems like he might be helping do the same thing for the streaming service.It’s got a costlier price tag than Fall ($36m v just $3m) and tracking suggests it might struggle to be profitable but if audiences do venture back out to the multiplex to see it, they’ll probably be as entertained as I, a no-frills B-movie pitched just right after so many A-movie counterparts got it so wrong. Helping this sea change, however, is The Sea Beast, from Chris Williams, director of Disney’s Bolt, Big Hero 6, and Moana. Not only have we already had Richard Linklater’s Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Odyssey earlier this year, but the end of the year will see Henry Selick teaming up with Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key on Wendell & Wild and Guillermo del Toro co-directing his take on Pinocchio. Yet the outlook for Netflix Animation in 2022 looks surprisingly robust. Especially with Netflix canceling animation projects earlier this year, it seemed like the great Netflix animated original might never come to pass. Netflix has worked with directors who previously worked for Disney, Universal, and other major animation studios, and while Netflix has been nominated for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars for films like Klaus and Over the Moon, Netflix has yet to have a film that has become a massive hit for them. Netflix Animation has certainly had its ups and downs in the relatively few years the streaming service has been making its own animated content.
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