‘The Beast’ Review: Samuel L. Jackson and Joel Kinnaman in a Renny Harlin Joint That’s a Deadly Combo of Silly and Tedious

The latest action flick from veteran director Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger) demonstrates its macho bona fides at the very beginning, when an onscreen crawl informs us that U.S. government security forces are a “dynamic, imperishable illustration of American might.”

It then goes on to add, “And it’s all just been fucking destroyed.”

The Beast

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Release date: Friday, October 9
Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Joel Kinnaman, Guy Burnet
Director: Renny Harlin
Screenwriter: Umair Aleem
Rated R, 1 hour 39 minutes

Cut to an intense firefight, since this is the sort of B-movie that doesn’t believe in wasting time with such niceties as plot development or character definition. Instead, we watch as the titular vehicle — you know, the one in which the president rides — is speeding down a road while Joel Kinnaman, playing a Secret Service agent, is engaged in intense combat with a hooded terrorist in the back seat. As the car drives on while dodging a series of explosions, a seemingly endless number of terrorists armed with automatic weapons shoot at it to no avail.

And did I mention that the armored car is being driven by the president, played by Samuel L. Jackson? And that nearly the entirety of the film takes place within the vehicle?

That’s the high concept of the rudimentary screenplay by Umair Aleem, who seems to have spent time studying Aristotle’s unity of place theory. He also seems to have studied Jackson’s film career, since the actor famous for his flair with the f-word plays a fictional president who relishes profanity even more than our current one.

“I love it when you say motherfucker,” the severely wounded agent, Taft, says admiringly to the president. “It sounds so good when you say it.”

Well, duh.

The two main characters have no idea who’s attacking them, and neither do we. But it doesn’t really matter, since the bad guys exist mainly to be mowed down by the Beast, which has even more tricked-up defenses and weaponry than we could have imagined, including armed drones and enough firepower to destroy a small city. It also has a self-driving function, for which we can presumably thank Elon Musk.

With Agent Taft reduced to bleeding out in the back seat, the action mainly falls to the president, a former military man with a very special set of skills. Now, we’ve seen plenty of badass presidents on the big screen, most notably Bill Pullman’s former fighter pilot in Independence Day and Harrison (“Get off my plane!”) Ford’s Vietnam War vet in Air Force One. Kickass presidents can also be women, as demonstrated by Viola Davis in G20.

But none of those compare to Jackson, playing a besieged U.S. president for the second time in his career, not that anyone remembers Big Game. This is a chief executive who drives a car like an F1 racer, displays the sort of hand-to-hand combat skills that Rambo would envy, and handles guns as if they were extensions of his arm. He also has serious medical skills, helping the wounded agent by removing the bullets from his body, hooking him up to an IV and suturing up his wounds.

You can rest assured that certain scenes from this film will soon be tweeted out by our current cosplaying commander in chief, only with his face superimposed over Jackson’s.

With The Beast determined to do for the Beast what Air Force One did for Air Force One, the film necessarily suffers from a certain claustrophobia despite the bulked-up car’s considerable space. Harlin applies his well-honed skills to the action scenes, meaning essentially the entire film, but there’s only so much he can do to compensate for its talkiness — Jackson’s POTUS, as you can imagine, tends to be a chatterbox — and the proceedings’ ultimate resemblance to a video game.

The film is about as silly as I hope I’ve made it sound and, more egregiously, tedious to boot. Although it’s sweet that when POTUS speaks on the phone to the first lady, she’s voiced by Jackson’s real-life spouse LaTanya Richardson Jackson.