Jenkins Lost with the Lions

I hope Disney paid Barry Jenkins a lot of money to direct Mufasa the Lion King. I also hope they made assurances about funding some personal films, about human beings, of the sort Jenkins is currently one of the best filmmakers at making. That’s the only way I could imagine the director of Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Medicine For Melancholy spending two or three years of his career on a prequel to a remake of a 30-year-old Disney movie.

Mustafa The Lion King follows the 2019 remake of The Lion King, directed by Jon Favreau, which merely retold the 1994 cartoon with the same Elton John/Tim Rice songs, only with “photo-realistic” CGI lions and other animals. That film, like the original, was a box office colossus, so now there’s a new movie that’s mostly a prequel, although there’s also a framing device set after the events of The Lion King.

Jenkins does the best he possibly can with this material. I just wish he had directed something, anything else.

The new film mostly tells the original story of Mufasa, the king from the original film, and the father of Simba, and how he fell out with the original film’s villain Scar (originally voiced by Jeremy Irons, now Kelvin Harrison, Jr.). There’s also a scene, built around Simba’s daughter Kiara (voiced by Beyonce’s daughter Blue Ivy Carter) hearing the story from monkey shaman Rafiki, who edges out Robbie Williams in Better Man as the film season’s most convincing singing monkey.

The film looks better than the 2019 Lion King, probably because Barry Jenkins is a much better director than Jon Favreau, and there are some beautiful kingdom vistas (Jenkins’ usual cinematographer, James Laxton, shot Mufasa). But it has a similar problem to Favreau’s film, in that it’s hard to tell the lions apart, and not easy to keep track of where we are and which lion is which other lion’s father.

There’s zero tension to the plot since we know that both Mustafa and Scar must survive to the beginning of The Lion King. And Timon and Pumbaa, the animal sidekicks voiced as in the 2019 film by Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner, are annoying as hell. And for some reason, their scenes are written like Deadpool and Wolverine, filled with constant inside showbiz jokes.

Meanwhile, there’s a suite of original songs, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda. They’re fairly forgettable, and none sound like Miranda’s songwriting style, or feature lyrical wit. Miranda’s an Oscar short of the EGOT, but this movie won’t him there. There’s also a musical store credited to Dave Metzger, although it borrows elements of Hans Zimmer’s score from the ’94 film.

The film’s dedicated to the late James Earl Jones, who voiced Scar in both earlier movies; Aaron Pierce, the Rebel Ridge star, voices the character but doesn’t attempt to sound like Jones.

Jenkins’ Moonlight won Best Picture for 2016. His James Baldwin adaptation If Beale Street Could Talk, two years later, was even better. I hope his next film is along those lines, rather than anything involving CGI lions.