Jonah Naplan   December 21, 2024

“Mufasa: The Lion King” is the most obvious movie of the entire year. By that, I mean practically every moment, every scene, every choice is so unbelievably predictable, cutting a clear path as to where it’s headed and never surprising us as viewers with some jagged left turn along the way. You already know where it’s gonna go immediately upon sitting down in the theater, and for the two hours that proceed you’ll get exactly what you expected. It’s an “obvious” film and knows it is. As a prequel to a beloved tale (the 1994 “Lion King” is one of the most praised animated movies of all time and, for that reason, a 2019 “live-action” remake received harsh backlash), the biggest challenge of “Mufasa” is to justify its own existence, a vapid task it only partially succeeds at. Watching the movie, I couldn’t stop thinking about how bored out of my mind I would’ve been had I seen it when I was seven years old. What’s the point here? Why do we need to see this? And how does watching this backstory enhance our appreciation of “The Lion King”? I left with these questions remaining ambiguous.

I’m not sure that anybody was really clamoring for a Mufasa origin story, but it’s certain that director Barry Jenkins (“Moonlight,” “If Beale Street Could Talk”) has attempted everything in his auteurist power to convince us we want one. His movie is, in fairness, a visual and emotional step-up from Jon Favreau’s “Lion King” outing, but not by much. There’s only so much he can play with when the screenplay by Jeff Nathanson, who wrote a couple of Steven Spielberg’s movies from the early aughts, feels so contrived, as if he took the basic storytelling beats from every prequel/origin story ever made and folded them into one film.

The young Mufasa (Aaron Pierre) this movie follows is a near carbon copy of Simba with his insatiable curiosity and brother-from-another-mother Taka (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) by his side who inevitably grows up to become the villainous Scar. Their treacherous journey together across the African plains to reach the promised land of Milele will acquaint them with a variety of familiar faces, including a young Rafiki (Kagiso Lediga), Sarabi (Tiffany Boone), and Zazu (Preston Nyman), characters who will all foreshadow or make reference to the roles they’ll go on to play in the future, one of the movie’s lazy thematic devices (a climactic battle crumbles a mountain, leaving Pride Rock in its remnants). Everyone’s on the run, too, from a deadly pack of white lions led by Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen), who wants revenge after his son was killed during an attack on Taka’s family. You’ll have to suspend your disbelief for this section of the plot because the bad cats seemingly always catch up to our heroes no matter how many cliffs, waterfalls and jungles they traverse.

As the main narrative unfolds, the movie periodically cuts back to the modern-day Rafiki who’s telling this very story to Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter), Simba’s daughter, and the rambunctious Timon (Billy Eichner) and Pumbaa (Seth Rogen) who provide eye-rolling commentary just to pad out space. These unfunny interludes are the reason why “Mufasa: The Lion King” feels so long at nearly two hours. They halt the story just when you think you’ve finally invested a shred of yourself in it, and they don’t at all enhance our understanding of what we’re watching.

That being said, “Mufasa” is almost certainly the most visually stunning of these Disney reimaginings since 2016’s “The Jungle Book,” showing genuine improvement in the use of motion-capture technology to highlight these animals as living creatures with thoughts and emotions instead of just objects moving about the frame. Jenkins, working with cinematographer James Laxton, isn’t afraid to use the camera in creative ways. Some choices really land, such as his use of bird’s-eye-view shots that typically encompass the lead characters at the beginning of a scene, but others, particularly an over-reliance on the fisheye lens, often focusing on a character as they flee from someone or something, are off-putting and bizarre.

Similarly derelict are the new songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda. They might be better than I think they are, but I’ll never know because the sound mixing of the musical numbers is appalling, the lyrics rendered inaudible. After speculating that the lack of quality in “Moana 2”’s songs was due to Miranda’s absence, I can now affirm that the work he was off doing instead is not any better. The music lacks inspiration, with characters breaking into song at awkward moments seemingly just because they can. Of course, they’re all shot beautifully, using the location of Africa as a thematic tool for the backdrop, but while writing this piece, I can’t name any of the songs, let alone recall the tunes.

Ultimately, though, it’s the dull, manufactured quality of “Mufasa” that holds it back the most. Almost every single creative choice feels tapped into by a large corporation looking for a big buck this Christmas weekend instead of by Jenkins who we know to be a generational talent (the terrific “Moonlight” won Best Picture in 2017). There’s so much here that he probably couldn’t have saved, and it’s at the fault of Disney to not allow him the space to experiment and strut his stuff. “Mufasa” is a movie comprised of so many promising pieces and assembled by so many impressive talents, yet they never fit together the way you’d expect.

What could’ve at the very least been an enhancing of our appreciation for “The Lion King” and its whimsical characters is instead a rote exercise in nostalgia-juicing and corporate creation. There’s little heart and soul to be found anywhere in this project and it’s not even entertaining enough to let us escape from the world for two hours. I think kids are going to be super bored, and that they’ll be far more entertained finding their own adventure in the auditorium by running up and down the aisles, asking their parents for more snacks, and kicking the seat in front of them than watching the adventure on-screen.

Now playing in theaters.