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

In this unbelievably old-fashioned 19th-century-set 1996 adventure movie, 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 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.

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) andThe Black Dahlia (2006), died on 1 January 2016, aged 85.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3701

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