Tyler Atkins’s cage-fighting drama does nothing the genre has not done before, and it does most of it properly. Daniel MacPherson holds it together with a stillness the script rarely earns, and the fights can be followed. We knew every beat before it landed.
Beast is the fighter’s comeback story, told again. David Frigerio’s script gives us Patton (Daniel MacPherson), a mixed martial artist the sport has written off, and a title match he has no business being anywhere near, and then it walks the road between the two in the order you would expect. Tyler Atkins directs without apology for any of this. The film is decent, it is careful, and it has not had a single idea that Rocky Balboa did not have first. Whether that bothers you will decide the evening.
MacPherson is the reason it works as well as it does. He plays Patton with his mouth shut and his shoulders down, a man who has learned that talking about a fight is a way of losing it early, and the film is at its best when the camera simply waits for him to do something. He does not sell the training scenes as triumph; he sells them as a job. When he is hit he takes it like a man who has been hit a great deal and has stopped finding it interesting. It is a quiet performance in a loud genre, and we warmed to it.
Russell Crowe, as Sammy, brings the film its ballast. He is slower than everyone else on screen, heavier in the chair, and he says his lines as if each one cost him something, which makes the few scenes he shares with MacPherson the ones with any weight. Luke Hemsworth’s Gabriel is the opposite register, bigger and louder and easier to read. Mojean Aria has presence as Malon James and not enough script. Kelly Gale’s Luciana is given the job most women in fight films are given, which is to stand in doorways and be worried about, and she does what can be done with it.
Thomaz Labanca shoots the cage from above and hard, so the canvas goes bright and the crowd drops into black behind the fence, and between rounds he lets the camera go handheld and close, catching the sweat and the cornermen’s hands. The fights themselves are legible, which is rarer than it should be: we always knew who was winning and why, and when a round turned we saw the moment it turned. Brian Cachia’s score keeps to low drums and held notes in the gym, then swells at the walkouts, and if it tells us what to feel it at least waits until we were going to feel it anyway. The cutting lets the rounds run rather than chopping them into flashes.
The trouble is that nothing surprises. Frigerio’s script arrives at each station on time: the doubt, the setback, the man who believes, the man who does not, the long run through the dark before the bell. The podcaster (Josh McKenzie) exists to tell us what the sport thinks of Patton, which is the kind of thing a film ought to be able to show. Conversations happen because the plot needs them to have happened, and characters leave rooms the moment their scene is done. It is not lazy; it is a film that has decided the shape is the point and the shape is enough.
Here is what we felt. Around the seventy-minute mark, knowing precisely what was coming and by what route, we found we had leant forward anyway, and we were faintly annoyed with ourselves about it. That is the old machinery working. The title match is properly staged and properly exhausting, and MacPherson’s face in the last round, blank with effort, did more than any of the speeches around it. We were never bored. We were never once caught out either.
Set against the genre’s own high marks, Warrior (2011) or The Wrestler (2008), Beast lacks the thing those films had, which was a private wound underneath the public one. Patton wants the belt. What else he wants, or is running from, the film gestures at and never sits with. That is the difference between a good fight film and one we would still be talking about in a year.
It runs 115 minutes and carries a 15. It is a sofa film in the honest sense: it asks nothing of the big screen, it plays well with the lights down and a drink in hand, and we would not be embarrassed to put it on for company who like this sort of thing. Go in for MacPherson and the fights, and do not expect to be surprised, because it has no intention of surprising you.
