Idris Elba vs. the Lion in ‘Beast’ Is the Best Movie Scene of the Year

Nothing could prepare me for the final scene in Beast.

Not our stellar review, nor the weeks full of jokes amongst our staff about The Daily Beast (I mean, our Twitter handle is @beastobsessed, so) readied me for the jaw-dropping five minutes of pure ecstasy at the end of Idris Elba’s new action-thriller.

At the end of the film, Nate (Elba), an ER doctor, engages in hand-to-hand combat with a giant, Jaws-sized lion. Read that again. Hand-to-hand combat. With a big honkin’ lion.

You should also know that this is the entire premise of Beast: Idris Elba battles a lion. OK, there’s a little bit more to the story. The lion is just so pissed off about the world. His family was killed by poachers, and in order to get revenge, the furry monster begins his rampage, killing every human in his path for sport. No, he’s not eating them; he’s simply slicing open their throats and leaving them to bleed out. Wouldn’t he be getting a bit hungry after doing that all day?

I digress. Nate spends most of the runtime evading the lion, but unable to stop its wrath. With his legs dangling out of a car window, he kicks its chest. Yeah, as if petty little punts from an untrained-in-physical-defense doctor are going to do any damage to this 600 pound brute. This would be like ramming a hammer into your forehead and expecting the hammer to bend backwards.

His youngest daughter actually tranquilizes the lion at one point. (“Your sister shoved a dart in his ass!” Nate yells to his other daughter to let her know the coast is clear, which made me cackle.). This allows the trio to escape from the big lions’ den into a normal-sized lions’ den. But the tranquilizer wears off, the lion follows them miles into another area of the safari, and with no ammunition left, Nate enters the ring with his bare hands and a small boy scout knife.

“Oh,” I thought to myself, thinking I was smarter than the movie. “Idris Elba is going to lure the titular beast into the other lions’ den, and the other male lions will protect their pride. Idris Elba is not going to fight the lion with his knuckles. It’s going to be like Jurassic Park, where the T-Rex actually saves the day by killing the raptors.”

I was wrong.

For somewhere between three to five minutes—I can’t tell you the exact time because I eventually blacked out from a rush of pure serotonin—Nate is mauled by the lion. He tries to sink a few punches, but it’s no use. The beast doesn’t slice his throat like his past kills, instead playfully pawing around with Elba until the other lions finally rush in.

There are a few questions that remain. Why did Beast allow Nate to be mauled by a lion for such a terrorizing amount of time? Apart from the logistics—no human being could make it out of a long lion fight alive—if the other lions were going to save the day anyway, why couldn’t it just be like 30 seconds of mauling? See the movie and you’ll understand. There’s a lot of mauling. Jaws never threw Roy Scheider in the ocean to strangle the great white underwater.

Now, I’m glad this scene happened, and I’m sure happy I get to joke/write about it, but there’s no reason Nate has to go out and fight the lion when he knows he’s going to lose. He locks his two daughters in a cage in an abandoned school—he should’ve put himself up in the cage too and waited for the lion to leave.

Idris Elba Fights a Lion in ‘Beast’ and It Is Totally F*cking Awesome

At the end of the movie, a jungle conservationist arrives just in time to collect everyone and bring them to a hospital. It’s not like Nate knew this would be the case, but his plan to lock his daughters in a school and be mauled by a lion wasn’t the best idea by any stretch of the imagination. If he’s afraid of starving to death in a cage, wouldn’t he be even more scared of orphaning his children and allowing them to starve to death in a cage without him?

But I’m sweeping these complaints into the trash bin in my brain to allow myself to just feel the rush of ecstasy after such a bizarre scene. It’s impossible to keep a straight face while the mauling goes down. Some folks may yelp. Some may laugh, like me. Some may even cry—out of joy, terror, emotion from watching such a brilliant moment in cinematic history.

And that’s what movies are all about. While I am eagerly awaiting the digital version of Beast to drop so that I may share the three minute clip of destruction with every single person in my phone contacts, it is worth seeing Beast on a very big screen. On a 52-foot IMAX screen, that menacing lion is worth every penny.

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