The Ghost and the Darkness *** (1996, Michael Douglas, Val Kilmer, Tom Wilkinson) – Classic Movie Review 3701

The 1996 historical adventure film The Ghost and the Darkness stars Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas, and is a fictional version of the two man-eating lions that terrorised workers at Tsavo, Kenya, during the building of the Uganda-Mombasa Railway in 1898.

In this unbelievably old-fashioned 19th-century-set 1996 adventure movie The Ghost and the Darkness, you expect to find both Tarzan and Allan Quatermain, since it seems to owe much to Edgar Rice Burroughs and Rider Haggard as to any true story that it is supposedly based on.

Val Kilmer plays an Irish bridge-building engineer called Colonel John Henry Patterson, who is employed to go to East Africa to supervise work on a river bridge for Britain’s railway system there in 1896. When two man-eating lions go on the rampage, killing over 130 people, acclaimed wild game hunter Charles Remington (Michael Douglas) is hired, and the two men join forces to vanquish the cunning monsters.

An attractively steady performance by Kilmer and an engaging over-the-top turn from Douglas (only entering half way into the movie) help to smooth this rather forlorn film, where it is easier to be on the side of the lion than to sympathise with the under-characterised humans. The material is oddly thin, and the handling earnest, plodding and disappointing – it would have worked far better either as a horror film or as an Indiana Jones-style jokey adventure.

But it is lavishly produced by Gale Anne Hurd, handsomely shot by Vilmos Zsigmond, and excitingly scored by Jerry Goldsmith, while Stephen Hopkins’s direction stirs up some moments of real tension and there are a few flashes of rapier wit in William Goldman’s screenplay. But why should we get worked up about a couple of lions 100 years ago? There’s little impression here of why Theodore Roosevelt called this the ‘most thrilling book of true stories ever written’.

Token woman Emily Mortimer gives a grating performance as Patterson (Kilmer)’s (happily) mostly absent wife. Also in the cast are Bernard Hill, John Kani, Brian McCardie, Henry Cele, Om Puri and Tom Wilkinson.

The script is based on The Man-eaters of Tsavo by Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson, the man who killed both real lions, but fictionalises it, introducing American big game hunter Charles Remington, based on Anglo-Indian big game hunter Charles H Ryall, superintendent of the Railway Police.

William Goldman heard about the story when travelling in Africa in 1984, and successfully pitched it to Paramount in 1989 as a cross between Lawrence of Arabia and Jaws. Goldman of the lions: ‘My feeling is that they were evil. I believe that for nine months, evil popped out of the ground at Tsavo.’

The film stalled till Michael Douglas moved his producing unit Constellation Films to Paramount. He read the script, calling it ‘an incredible thriller about events that actually took place.’

Douglas decided to produce and eventually decided to play Remington himself after Sean Connery and Anthony Hopkins declined. Neither Hopkins nor Goldman were happy about Douglas playing Remington and that his role was expanded and given a history.

The cast

The cast are Michael Douglas as Charles Remington, Val Kilmer as Colonel John Henry Patterson, John Kani as Samuel, Brian McCardie as Angus Starling, Bernard Hill as David Hawthorne, Om Puri as Abdullah, Tom Wilkinson as Sir Robert Beaumont, Emily Mortimer as Helena Patterson, and Henry Cele as Mahina.

Vilmos Zsigmond (June 16, 1930 – January 1, 2016)

Hungarian-born cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, winner of an Oscar for Close Encounters of the Third Kind and a nominee for The Deer Hunter, The River (1984) and The Black Dahlia (2006), died on 1 January 2016, aged 85.

Val Edward Kilmer (December 31, 1959 – April 1, 2025)

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3,701

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