The Kittencat Who Would Be King | Mufasa: The Lion King (2024) Movie Review
IS this even a movie? What IS it? I’m unsettled 🫣
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Mufasa: The Lion King is the first photorealistic Disney remake I’ve bothered to see (getting to see movies for free every day helps), and it makes me pretty grateful I had the good sense to skip the others leading up to this one.
I couldn’t sleep at night if I’d paid a dime of my own money to see this.
I didn’t bother to see Favreau’s 2019 The Lion King remake, but at that time, I had the sense that the photorealistic-animation film was more a tech-demo or experiment than a film. Five-plus years later, it’s not fair to call it an experiment anymore, but it’s still very much true that this seems like a tech-demo in search of some heart or soul.
We arrive at the conceit of the piece. This script seems to be a collection of production gambits, and little else. Timon and Pumbaa are in this movie (a LOT), because if you’re out to make money, you’d be crazy not to include them.
Are they in the story being told?
They are not. At all. And they hang a lampshade on it about forty times, when we for some inexplicable reason dip out of the story Rafiki is telling to the audience, which includes Simba’s daughter, Kiara, and the two savannah m8s over and over and over again.
If they had anything interesting to say (it’s all very meta, including literal winks to camera, but none of it is good, worthwhile or had more than a modicum of thought put into it), I would not so much resent it that they’re constantly intruding into the bare-bones story we’re being told to complain about not being in it. It’s a sort of Catch-22, wherein the main story isn’t compelling or captivating enough to resist checking in with Timon & Pumbaa, and Timon & Pumbaa only manage to undercut what little gravitas or momentum that main story has when they interrupt it.
A lot of these numbers are made up or don’t matter, but it gives us a rough idea of how successful this corporate strategy/’creative’ direction has been thus far. By my count, Disney has invested (very roughly) $2.801 Billion to gross (less roughly) $10.221 Billion to net $7.42 Billion, plus value for their streaming service that’s way harder to calculate.
So, basically, what the fuck do I know? I sort of inferred from the continuation of the process that it must have been going well for Disney, but adding up the numbers was sobering. This has been wildly successful for Disney (not counting Mulan, which is a mystifying failure in hindsight, given how well the rest of these have typically done).
But just because they make money doesn’t mean that they’re good. Take Sonic 3, which I also saw this weekend.
Listen to this quote from Paramount’s heavily-bro President of Domestic Distribution:
“As we’ve seen this franchise’s audience grow, we saw a window in the marketplace in December where we thought we could stand out,” says Paramount’s president of domestic distribution Chris Aronson. “We’ve been able to accomplish that. ‘Sonic’ is going to dominate through the holidays.”
Soulless. Tone-deaf. Circling dates on calendars and crushing the competition. What the fuck does that have to do with art?
12:18 to 12:26 — that’s eight full minutes of screentime before we get into the Mufasa storyline. It’s interminable, and feels like hours. Timon & Pumbaa are so obnoxious and underwritten; it sounds like Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner were told to just go nuts.
I have no idea whether they improv’d any of their dialogue, but it would explain a lot. I’d hate to think someone wrote any of that.
Once Rafiki joins the story, the narrative picks up a little bit. I’m remembering that he’s the most interesting, dynamic character from the original, as well, and this movie wisely leans into the basis of Mufasa’s relationship with Rafiki.
One thing I didn’t realize watching The Lion King is that the locale, the monarchy, the whole culture and society, are basically brand new. Lions typically live until about 14 years old, so Pride Rock became Pride Rock due to an elephant stampede (there’s about twenty stampedes in this movie, buckle up) maybe two or three years before Simba was born?
Forgive me, but in my head canon, Mufasa was one in a long, unbroken line of lion kings, which Simba is the first to buck.
Nah.
Mufasa is essentially an upjumped usurper whom the script does backflips to make into a reluctant true-king.
This film was capped for me by its anticlimactic ending, both onscreen and in the theatre. One, lone person attempted to clap at the end as credits rolled, and NOBODY joined in. I don’t think the kids were still with us. The ones that were yet awake were rustling and fidgeting by the time the story ended.
What a weird, boring chore.
It’s not the worst thing you could see with your kids, but I can’t imagine it’s the best, either, and I’d have been upset if I had spent a penny of my hard-earned money on this underwhelming cash-grab. Woof.
