Mufasa: The Lion King review – let down by weak script and songs

“Every­thing the light touch­es” is an apt descrip­tor for the fea­tures, shorts and TV shows made by Bar­ry Jenk­ins in col­lab­o­ra­tion with his trusty cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er James Lax­ton dur­ing the first lit­tle por­tion of the 21^st cen­tu­ry. In films such as Moon­light and If Beale Street Could Talk, and his extra­or­di­nary TV saga, The Under­ground Rail­road, he used his cam­era and lights to both empow­er char­ac­ters whose rep­re­sen­ta­tion on screen had long been dimin­ished, and to depict faces and bod­ies in ways that hadn’t been seen before. 

Jenk­ins is, with­out a doubt, one of if not the most impor­tant work­ing film­mak­ers in Amer­i­ca right now, and it is for that rea­son that we must approach his toe-dip into the world of dig­i­tal­ly-dri­ven main­stream fran­chise film­mak­ing, Mufasa: The Lion King, with empa­thy and rev­er­ence rather than cyn­i­cism or cau­tion. The fact is, with the films he now has under his belt, he should be able to do what­ev­er he god damn pleas­es, and we should sit-up and listen.

And yes, I under­stand that this wouldn’t need to be stat­ed so fer­vent­ly if I didn’t har­bour my own lit­tle scin­til­la of sus­pi­cion about the project. And that always occurs when a trust­ed, excit­ing auteur who appears to be carv­ing a niche or build­ing up a body of work takes a bit of a wild career U‑turn to ful­fil some per­son­al ambi­tion that may seem inscrutable to fol­low­ers. As crit­ics, we mere­ly have to work a lit­tle hard­er to draw per­ti­nent con­nect­ing lines between this and his pre­vi­ous work.

Way back in 2019, they couldn’t fill up the mon­ey sacks fast enough with the prof­its accrued from Jon Faverau’s ​“live action”, beat-for-beat remake of 1994’s ani­mat­ed behe­moth, The Lion King. And so this pre­quel from Jenk­ins, visu­alised from a new script by Jeff Nathanson, seemed inevitable, and was like­ly weighed down with the lofty box office expec­ta­tions set by its predecessor.

Dis­ney tends to have prob­lems when it comes to their sequels; they sel­dom play like nec­es­sary con­tin­u­a­tions of the orig­i­nal, often closed sto­ries, and are more like vic­to­ry laps with extra lash­ings of that thing you already said you loved. Mufasa: The Lion King does suf­fer a lit­tle from that, ham­pered by the need for seam­less brand con­ti­nu­ity and con­triv­ing con­nec­tions to the things that made the first film so successful.

As the title sug­gests, this is the ori­gin sto­ry of Mufasa, the mighty, bari­tone-voiced father of Sim­ba, and how he came to be a vaunt­ed and wise king of the Pride Lands (pri­or to being slain by his treach­er­ous ​“sib­ling”, Scar). It’s a sto­ry framed as a fire­side yarn intoned by wise old man­drill, Rafi­ki, and told to Simba’s own cub, Kiara, as she waits for her folks to return home dur­ing a vio­lent storm. Tim­on and Pum­ba are, of course, on hand for some misc caper­ing, as there’s no way you could real­ly leave these now-icon­ic com­ic reliefs on the bench.

Where the orig­i­nal The Lion King works as a ruth­less­ly effi­cient revenge saga dot­ted with killer tunes, Mufasa’s plea­sures are per­haps less direct, arriv­ing in the form of polit­i­cal alle­go­ry and light exis­ten­tial dis­course. The young king-in-wait­ing finds sud­den­ly him­self orphaned as he’s swept away from his par­ents in flash flood­wa­ters and is sud­den­ly forced to fight for his future among a new pride who spurn out­siders. Luck­i­ly he finds a fast friend in Taka, who saves him from drown­ing, and a cham­pi­on in the mater­nal Eshe (Thandi­we New­ton) who teach­es him the prac­ti­cal­i­ties of hunt­ing when he is forced to live with the more indus­tri­ous females.

Yet a group of fero­cious and dom­i­neer­ing white oppres­sors, led by Mads Mikkelsen’s Kiros, dri­ve them from their land and insti­gate a cross coun­try odyssey towards the dream­like idyll of Malele – a land­scape of per­fec­tion and plen­ty that exists just beyond the hori­zon. Jenk­ins’ film talks frankly about white colo­nial oppres­sion as not being mere­ly con­cerned with cul­tur­al and geo­graph­ic plun­der, but with the neu­ter­ing of blood­lines and erad­i­ca­tion of indige­nous pop­u­la­tions. It offers a sim­i­lar­ly roman­ti­cised and unspe­cif­ic vision of the African con­ti­nent (we only real­ly know it’s Africa due to the Afrobeat-inflect­ed musi­cal cues), but one that’s more fine­ly-attuned to its his­to­ry and the malign inter­ests of a pow­er­ful few.

Maybe this reads like we’re mak­ing excus­es, but it feels like the main issues with the film fall beyond Jenk­ins’ purview as a direc­tor: the under­whelm­ing, hook-free songs from Lin-Manuel Miran­da, which may be some of the weak­est to ever fea­ture in a Dis­ney pic­ture; a script which lays out many of its big dra­mat­ic reveals way too ear­ly; and just the inher­ent lack of expres­sive poten­tial in this form of ​“live action” ani­ma­tion, in which we are remind­ed of the incon­ve­nient fact that ani­mals sim­ply don’t emote through facial expressions.

Aaron Pierre is one of the most excit­ing actors on the cur­rent block, and while he is def­i­nite­ly able to emu­late the hon­eyed boom of the late James Earl Jones (to whom the film is ded­i­cat­ed), his is a duti­ful rather than char­ac­ter­ful piece of voice work as the teenage Mufasa. And that’s per­haps a prob­lem with the film as a whole, where every­thing feels duti­ful­ly done and up to code, while no indi­vid­ual ele­ments real­ly shine through. It was an excit­ing prospect to see what some­one like Jenk­ins would do while up against the Hol­ly­wood machine, but it unfor­tu­nate­ly feels like the machine won this bout, if not by knock­out, then def­i­nite­ly on points.