Style: Idris Elba proves his James Bond credentials in Beast

All hail the B-movie creature feature in all its pulp glory, from Anaconda and Crawl to Liam Neeson’s The Grey. Now Idris Elba steps up to the plate with Beast, a 93-minute rumble in the jungle which really sells itself: it’s Big Driis versus a big cat. And it gets proper, proper scrappy.

In a major movie worth around thirty-six million dollars, everyone’s favourite 007 fan-casting and a ravenous lion have a fistfight. Not only is there the slugfest, said lion picks off a slew of poachers, anti-poachers, villagers and tourists alike in a fashion akin to an alien John McTiernan baddie, so far as to leave you expecting skinned bodies dangling from the trees, or plasma casters to pop up from its muscular shoulders. Immediately sold.

All of these noble laurels aside, Beast is a distinct prospect because it actually boasts a little welcome weight. Yes, that primordial matchup is the reason you’re stepping through the door, but you stick around for the surprising amount of heart. Further, unlike, say, the Piranha franchise, the predator isn’t cast a blood-thirsty villain so much as the result of ecological ruin: this is an animal whose family has been poached into oblivion, protecting the little it has left from the species that bodes catastrophe.

There isn’t much more of a plot, because a film like this does not need a plot, but here’s the gist: Elba plays Nate Samuels, an American doctor (of some description — he needs to be good at stitching up wounds, basically) vacationing on a South African reserve with his teenage daughters. He meets up with his old pal Martin Battles, a biologist played by the inimitable character actor Sharlto Copley. They spend the night before their first venture into the bush getting pissed as farts on old whiskey, remembering the Old Times, and reminiscing over his since-passed wife, who Martin knew as a kid.