Where i Watched It: Peacock

Audio Description Provided By: Media Access Group

Narrated By: Ingrid Tudor

Can you make a film about idris Elba and two girls trapped in a car and being stalked by an insane lion scary? Well, not really, but you can make it feature length and violent.

honestly, I stopped taking the film seriously when idris catches a snake lunging at him in mid air. He’s not a skilled fighter, but he snatches that shit because it looks cool. We don’t do things because they look cool, we make sure they serve the plot.

Also, there was something very weird about the dynamic of Elba’s brother in law being Sharlto Copley. There is a great deal of talk about where Elba should have buried his ex-wife, who died before this trip, and Copley believes she would have wanted to be buried in her ancestral home. Is that supposed to be ironic? White people calling Africa their ancestral home? What a very odd plot point.

But, for the most part, the film centers around a dad taking his girls back to Africa to show them where their mother grew up, and tour the preserve that his brother in law, their uncle, works to maintain. The girls resent their father to varying extents. But, at the end of the day, he’s about to go Ghost And The Darkness for them.

Since fighting a lion for a whole movie would be exhausting, the film also tackles poaching. So, poachers are a side villain.

It’s not a scary film, but it can be entertaining. Sure, they try for some jump scares. They knock out the sound, and have a character stand there in silence before an attack, so it qualifies for a subdued Halloween experience. Mostly, it’s just gory lion violence.

Idris makes this entertaining. The audio description does well, considering the point of many scenes is that there is nothing to see because it takes place in the middle of nowhere in pitch black darkness. They do great with what they are given.

I thought this would be dumb, to be totally honest, but it managed to justify its runtime. So, I’ll endorse it a little.

Final Grade: B-