This was our Guy Movie Night pick for October, and I want to be upfront that it was picked in a month that also had Digger and The Social Reckoning on the table. One of those is a genuinely ambitious, extraordinarily overstuffed meditation on catharsis and climate guilt that happened to flop spectacularly at the box office. The other is a gorgeously written, five years too late lecture about an algorithm we already understood. And then there’s The Beast, which is neither ambitious nor overdue nor particularly interested in being either of those things. It is a president, a bulletproof limousine, and roughly ninety minutes of nonstop, unexplained, absolutely bombastic assault that comes in one loud tsunami after another. It is a horrifically bad action movie. It is also, in its own deeply stupid way, kind of a blast, which is exactly the energy you want walking into a guy’s movie night pick.
Samuel L. Jackson plays the President of the United States, a man named Oscar Paladin, and the entire premise of this movie is that his motorcade gets hit by a coordinated, overwhelming attack, and it just does not stop. Joel Kinnaman plays his lead Secret Service agent, who gets gravely wounded almost immediately, which means the back half of this movie is largely Jackson driving an armored car called the Beast while also field dressing a dying man and periodically remembering Vietnam. Renny Harlin directs, which tracks, because this has the unmistakable, unbothered DNA of a guy who made Cliffhanger and Die Hard 2 and genuinely does not care whether any of this makes sense as long as something is exploding in frame at all times.
Full Spoiler Walkthrough of The Beast
I will say – the rest of this write up will be spoiler filled. But trust me when I say… it does not matter. There is nothing here to spoil. It goes boom. And doesn’t stop going boom. The end.
The movie opens with an unexplained, over the top, completely continuous assault on the President’s motorcade, and it keeps escalating from there with zero setup. We eventually learn, mostly through radio chatter and a Department of Defense call that gets cut off mid conversation, that this isn’t an attack on one motorcade or even one country. It’s happening everywhere, simultaneously, to basically every free nation on earth at once. We are never told how. We are never told why. There’s no mastermind monologuing somewhere, no reveal of a shadow organization, no ideology on display. It’s just pure, coordinated chaos, apparently efficient enough to take out nearly every head of state’s own version of the Beast in the same window of time, except for Oscar Paladin’s.
From launch to ending, the plot is genuinely this simple. The motorcade gets wiped out, Paladin and Agent Taft are the only survivors, Taft is gravely injured, and the two of them need to drive to an extraction point. That’s it. That’s the whole movie, stretched across nearly the entire runtime, which is, yes, exactly the structure of a video game mission, and I don’t think that’s an accident so much as it’s just what happens when an action movie commits this hard to a single, unbroken drive. Along the way we learn the First Lady might be dead, that other heads of state around the world are very likely dead, and that the Beast itself has a lot more going on under the hood than Paladin apparently realized, because the weapons available to him escalate as the movie goes, machine guns giving way to a mini-guns giving way to an honest to god railgun moment that rent space and time. A special effects moment that was so utterly other that it had no place being in a movie grounded in “reality”. It might have even broken a Marvel movie it was so over the top.
Now – I will say this, that Paladin keeps flashing back to Vietnam throughout, which is the movie’s one concession to plausibility, since it means the president of the United States mowing down a dozen armed men with a knife isn’t coming entirely out of nowhere. It’s not point blank implausible. It’s more like ninety nine percent improbable with a one percent escape hatch.
The movie winds down with Paladin trapped in an overturned Beast, badly outnumbered, and he makes the call to trigger the vehicle’s self destruct rather than be taken. As the countdown ticks, his wife finally makes contact with him, and that’s the beat that actually gets him to want to live again rather than go out with the car. And then, somehow, in the chaos of everyone outside focused on the countdown, nobody notices him slip out through the trunk. He then proceeds to hunt down and kill a dozen armed men with a knife, alone, on foot, which is the kind of thing that only works in a movie that has already spent ninety minutes convincing you the laws of physics don’t really apply to this particular president.
My Actual Thoughts
Here’s the thing about the premise that I can’t get past. Every single free country on earth gets hit at the exact same moment, with no warning, no chatter beforehand, nothing, in what has to be the most perfectly orchestrated simultaneous decapitation of global leadership in the history of fiction, and the movie just never bothers to explain any of it. Not a little. Not at all. It happens because the movie needs it to happen so Samuel L. Jackson can drive a tank shaped limousine through a warzone, and that’s genuinely the entire justification. I kept waiting for some kind of reveal, a state actor, a tech billionaire, anything, and it just never comes. The attack is the premise and the premise is the attack.
And look, I understand that the presidential limousine is supposed to be absurdly over engineered. That’s real, that’s not a joke, the actual Beast is a legitimately hardened vehicle. But the level of resilience this movie asks you to buy is not in the realm of real world military engineering anymore, it’s in the realm of fairies and myths. This car survives sustained small arms fire, explosives, and what I can only describe as light siege warfare, for the better part of an hour and a half, while also apparently hiding a mini-gun and a railgun that nobody mentioned Paladin even knew about until he needed them. At a certain point you stop watching an action movie about a resilient vehicle and start watching a video game cutscene where the player just found one new weapon pickup after another. It’s not like the movie resembles a Call of Duty mission. It is a Call of Duty mission, power ups included, with Samuel L. Jackson digitally inserted into the middle of it.
To the movie’s credit, and I want to actually give it this credit, the Vietnam backstory does real work here. It’s the one piece of connective tissue that keeps Paladin single handedly clearing a dozen armed men with a blade from feeling completely insane, because the film has at least planted a seed that this specific man has relevant experience doing exactly this, a long time ago, under different circumstances. It’s thin justification stretched about as far as it can go, but it’s there, and I noticed it, and I’ll take it over nothing.
Samuel L. Jackson swearing his way through a global coup might genuinely be the most plausible explanation the movie offers for why he, specifically, out of every head of state on the planet, is the one who makes it out. I don’t know what else to tell you. Pair this movie next to Digger’s five layers of meaning or Social Reckoning’s five years of being right about something we already knew, and The Beast doesn’t even bother showing up to that conversation. It knows exactly what it is. It is dumb, it is loud, it makes zero sense from its opening frame to its last one, and it is still, somehow, a genuinely fun pick for a group of guys who just wanted to watch a bulletproof car outrun the collapse of the entire free world for ninety minutes. Sometimes that’s all you actually need from a Tuesday night.
