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 21st 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.