Mufasa: The Lion King Review
Mufasa doesn’t so much roar onto screens, as thud onto them with a ‘woof’. This one’s an absolute dog.
With Simba (Donald Glover) and Nala (Beyonce) away, their daughter Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter) finds herself terrified by a storm. Seeking to pacify her, Rafiki (John Kani) begins telling her the story of her grandfather Mufasa (Aaron Pierre) - a lost lion who found a brother in Taka (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), friends in Zazu (Preston Nyman) and Young Rafiki (Kahiso Lediga), and love in Sarabi (Tiffany Boone), as they fled the terror of the Outsiders and their leader Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen) in the search for the fabled Malaylay.
Directed, intriguingly perhaps, by Barry Jenkins - who recently exhorted the difficulties of the process of working on a film like this - Mufasa: The Lion King is an interminable experience in the theatre. You’re left mentally crawling across the barren expanse of this film; the glimmering light of the half-remembered and excellent original animated lion king glittering on the horizon like an oasis on the Sahara, never quite reachable.
To start with, there are about 50 characters in this movie that Jenkins has to work hard to shoehorn in. The sheer array of lions, all barely distinguishable from one another, leaves one utterly bereft; couple that with the ‘present day’ device of Rafiki speaking with the young Kiara, which just adds more characters to the mix, and you feel like this movie is overstuffed to the max.
That’s a feeling that continues with the plot, which has our lead character Mufasa journeying through different settings and scenes in leaps and bounds, no care given to the rhyme or reason of any of it.
That is probably the biggest issue with the film; the plot’s lack of structure and the dialogue’s lack of subtlety. This is a movie that has no bridging elements; a movie that doesn’t bother to trouble you as to the how’s and why’s of our characters (a) doing things (b) feeling things or (c) getting places. They’re at a tree? Now on top of a mountain? Great! Mid-song change from night to day? Great! Suddenly in Malaylay? No worries!
Add to this that anything these characters do or feel is underscored inevitably by a line of dialogue that just tells you exactly what is happening - like trowelling exposition straight down your throat - and you’ve got a perfect storm. It all culminates in a reunion sequence where Mufasa inexplicably starts describing everything he sees and feels to the assembled crowd, just to get a full wrap up of the plot and make sure even the youngest in the audience understand every single plot point.
Visually, the film isn’t terrible. The CGI has come on in great strides since the re-do of The Lion King by Jon Favreau, and while it still doesn’t look like real life except in still images, it’s not as distracting as it once was. Consistently, though, you find yourself asking why one would bother making the movie like this?
Just like the OG, this is a fully animated film - just with a photorealistic animation style. It’s not a live action adaptation, nor a live action adaptation with some animated elements (like, say, the upcoming Snow White). It’s a straight up animation, so comparing apples with apples, it is comparably and objectively worse than other animated Lion King’s, including the original and its sequel. This means particularly that when you’re watching these big musical numbers, and the assembled animals moving in time or dancing starts to happen, you can’t help wishing that they weren’t constrained by the physical limitations of the real-world aesthetic, so that these big musical sequences looked better.
Because that is the final nail in the coffin here - the music, which I have to say is some of the worst music Manuel-Miranda has ever done. There’s only a handful of songs here, but each is worse than the last; the terrible ‘I Always Wanted A Brother’ and ‘Bye Bye’ both particularly egregious. You can’t keep expecting the king to pump out banger after banger in every Disney movie, so here’s hoping Manuel-Miranda shook out all the jitters with this array of also-rans.
In the end, Mufasa: The Lion King not only fails to justify its own existence; it also goes a long way to burning the goodwill of prior entries.
