“The Beast” is no relation to the brilliant head-spinner of the same name from Bertrand Bonello, starring Léa Seydoux, nor is it connected to the similarly titled Russell Crowe MMA-related drama from earlier this year. No, this is the new action thriller from Renny Harlin, his second release this year. His previous entry was the “big, dumb, and eminently forgettable” “Deep Water,” in which Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley played commercial pilots whose plane crash-landed in the ocean, where survivors then had to fend off a group of dubiously rendered CGI mako sharks. But after seeing “The Beast,” the former feels like Harlin’s artistic high-water mark for the year.
The title refers to the heavily armored, tricked-out car the Secret Service maintains to carry the president around, even shipping it to foreign countries to maintain safety. After a couple of opening title cards describing the vehicle (“A Dynamic Imperishable Illustration of American Might”), we are plunged immediately into a chaotic scene in which a foreign-based summit meeting has just been hit by one of what is later revealed to be a series of coordinated terrorist attacks throughout the world. Many are killed, but Oscar (Samuel L. Jackson), a.k.a. the President of the United States, manages to escape and gets behind the wheel of the car with Taft (Joel Kinnaman), a badly wounded member of his Secret Service detail, in the back.
Amid the chaos in the streets, Oscar tries to drive to the planned rendezvous point to link up with the rest of his travel party—including FLOTUS—and get Taft the medical attention he needs. But when that route is compromised, he is forced to pilot the car through the streets and into one attack after another over the next 90-odd real-time minutes.
Before long, however, Oscar takes advantage of the car’s unique defense capabilities and mows down, machine-guns, or otherwise decimates the hordes of bad guys who pop up out of nowhere for just that purpose. When he isn’t busy doing that, Oscar also finds time for a few flashbacks to his time in Vietnam, frets about his MIA wife, and even performs, to the tune of Waylon Jennings’s version of “Midnight Rider,” a bit of impromptu roadside surgery that would impress even Tom Waits.
What we have in “The Beast,” in essence, is a shotgun marriage between “Air Force One” and “Locke.” While such a hybrid sounds intriguing in the abstract, it falls flat in execution. The screenplay by Umair Aleem feels like it was concocted by an AI program fed the contents of a basic-cable action marathon for “inspiration.” While the idea of presenting an overheated action spectacle almost entirely from inside a car sounds intriguing, it quickly becomes tiresome; since the mayhem is mostly outside the vehicle, it stays at a remove that keeps you from getting fully invested in what is going on.
At the same time, there are a couple of points where the story flirts with being serious—as when the film touches on Oscar’s Vietnam experiences or when we hear of all the world leaders who have been killed along the way—that come across as rather jarring when mixed in with the more ludicrous excesses of the story.
The film also lacks a decent villain, essential for something like this to succeed. All we get here are faceless, anonymous foreign maniacs who merely pop up to be gunned down by our righteous commander-in-chief (some of them do get a chance to murder civilians along the way). The closest thing we get to an explanation is a recorded recitation of W.B. Yeats’s suitably apocalyptic poem “The Second Coming,” which may be a little too on the nose for some but better than one from the collected works of Rod McKeun or Jewel.
Of course, it doesn’t have much in the way of compelling heroes either. Jackson and Kinnaman both go through their paces with a certain degree of professionalism but are undone by the one-dimensional nature of both their characters and the story.
“The Beast” wants to be a big slab of red meat for the action crowd but comes across as pure gristle. I’d compare it to the super-dumb genre films Cannon Films cranked out back in the day, but even those efforts, as brainless and cliched as they were, often had some weirdness that let them stand out. The film’s only moments of interest inevitably have you flashing back to other, infinitely better movies—at one point, Jackson’s character begins a conversation by asking what a particular sandwich is called in a foreign country. It is little more than a gory, clichéd cartoon. While the notion of Jackson and Harlin teaming up again may stir some excitement in the hearts of old-school genre fans, even they will struggle to muster enthusiasm.
