If you thought the idea of Liam Neeson punching wolves in the face was cool, imagine Idris Elba punching a lion. And bonus: we actually get to see our movie star land those punches which makes this flick automatically better than The Grey.

Idris Elba is on photo safari in South Africa and finds himself hunted by a rogue lion with a beef. He’s there with his two disaffected daughters and their family friend played by Sharlto Copley. Why does the lion attack? It was in a grief counseling session with the shark from Jaws: The Revenge… this time it’s personal.

There are some effective thrills in this flick and the CGI lion is quite good (and gets an assist from being filmed mostly at night). There are the usual number of dumb decisions for this type of flick but they didn’t overwhelm the movie. Mostly it was a series of face-offs and run-ins with a grumpy killer cat that mostly worked.

The flaw with the movie comes in the down-time and the interpersonal drama. Elba and the two girls do what they can, but we’re tossed into their lives with the usual slapdash expository backstory and expected to really care. One of these days, these survival-type thrillers will figure out what Jaws did back in the ’70s: how to make interesting characters who have interesting dialog.

The filmmaking consists of a lot of fairly impressive long takes… and if they had hidden cuts, they were done well enough to fool me. It wasn’t super showy… more matter-of-fact, if you notice there hasn’t been a cut, then that’s gravy.

This is an effective little thriller in the unexpected sub-genre of pissed-off rogue lion movies. It was effective when it was effective and a little eye-rolley during the times when nobody was being torn apart by a pissed-off cat. It did look good though… effective film-making and visual effects. Pretty good entertainment.

Score: 85