Review: More bore than roar: Disney’s Lion King prequel Mufasa is not exactly a problem-free philosophy

• Mufasa: The Lion King
• Directed by Barry Jenkins
• Written by Jeff Nathanson
• Featuring the voices of Aaron Pierre, Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Seth Rogen
• Classification PG; 118 minutes
• Opens in theatres Dec. 20

Barry Jenkins has already asked himself the question that we’re all thinking.

In a recent and extraordinarily depressing New York Magazine profile, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk spoke about his abrupt leap into the Disney machine to make the “photo-realistic” Lion King prequel Mufasawhich was conceived entirely inside the guts of a few thousand computers.

Before journalist Matt Zoller Seitz could ask his subject what led to such a career detour – why one of the most talented American filmmakers working today decided to abandon real, live filmmaking for something wholly manufactured – Jenkins jumped the rhetorical gun by saying, “When I took this job, the idea was, ‘What does Barry Jenkins know about visual effects? Why the hell would he do this movie?”

I mean, yeah, fair enough, Barry. Why exactly would the filmmaker lock himself and his talented roster of long-time collaborators – including cinematographer James Laxton, editor Joi McMillon, production designer Mark Friedberg – inside Disney’s visual-effects laboratory for four whole years to make a film that only the Mouse House’s accounting team, and perhaps the most desperately bored of latchkey children, were asking for? Obviously, the money must have been good. And the temptation to pop open Disney’s VFX toy chest and play around with its high-priced gadgets can be hard to resist. But do the ultimate results of Mufasa: The Lion King justify the fact that one of film’s great talents was taken out of the game for almost half a decade?

Not especially, no.

Yet at the same time, Mufasa is far more … well … not exactly enjoyable, but certainly more tolerable than even the most hardened and cynical cinephile might have feared. It even – in exceptionally brief but memorable and critical moments – looks as beautiful as Rob Minkoff and Roger Allers’s original 1994 animated film. Make no mistake: If Mufasa ends up somehow being the very last Barry Jenkins movie ever made, then it will stand as a tragedy and a disgrace. But if it is merely a one-for-you-one-for-me blip on his filmography – if it affords him the opportunity to take that many more risks the next time around – then it is an understandable enough distraction.

Set a few years after the events of Jon Favreau’s reprehensibly boring 2019 remake of The Lion King – which was not quite a “live-action” reboot, given that not a single thing on-screen existed beyond a series of ones and zeroes – Mufasa opens with the young lion cub Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter) waiting out a rainstorm while her parents, the lion king Simba (Donald Glover) and his mate Nala (Beyonce, Blue Ivy’s real-life mom), are awaiting the birth of Kiara’s brother. To help pass the time, Simba’s old adviser, the wise mandrill Rafiki (John Kani), along with the comic-relief duo of meerkat Timon (Billy Eichner) and warthog Pumbaa (Seth Rogen), tell Kiara a story of how her grandfather first came to rule the Pride Lands.

Most of the action then follows the young Mufasa (Rebel Ridge’s Aaron Pierre, ferocious even behind the digital mane) as he bonds with his adoptive brother Taka (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and learns to defend the land from the power-hungry – and just plain hungry – white lion Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen, once again playing a poorly sketched villain). There is a mildly interesting narrative thread involving the tension between the politics of blood and the courage of true leadership – Taka’s father essentially wants to Make the Pride Lands Great Again – and the story is careful to steer clear of echoing the same pat life lessons as its franchise predecessors, which include a host of direct-to-video sequels the Disney+ algorithm will soon direct your family toward.

But where Mufasa distinguishes itself is Jenkins’s eye for balancing emotion with action. Favreau’s soulless 2019 predecessor seemingly existed only to match and then painfully prolong the exact same beats as Minkoff and Allers’s film.

Jenkins’s follow-up, though, has something of an aesthetic mind of its own. His virtual cameras swoop in and out of the Pride Lands with the joy and enthusiasm of a child playing around with his very first toy – which, I suppose, is exactly what Jenkins is doing. Mufasa dives deep underwater and high into the horizon, with Jenkins never, ever slowing the visual pace down.

This doesn’t always work to the film’s advantage: When the more quiet and contemplative scenes arrive – such as when the increasingly pitiful Taka realizes that he will never match Mufasa’s selflessness – they’re upset by a jittery energy that threatens to rip you right out of the moment.

Also not helping is the script by long-time franchise resuscitator Jeff Nathanson (Speed 2, Rush Hour 3, Indiana Jones 4), which feels disconnected from Jenkins’s more subtle and poetic sensibility. Constantly weighed down by a cinematic disease known as prequel-itis – wherein every little element from the original movie gets its own mini origin story – the story also constantly pulls the rug out from under itself. Just as the Mufasa/Taka dynamic gains momentum, we’re pulled back to Timon and Pumbaa wisecracking around the margins. Eichner and Rogen get the film’s best gags – and give them more edge than even Nathan Lane and Ernie Sabella might have in the O.G. Lion King – but the constant back-and-forth between the past and the present unmoors the narrative.

What does Mufasa ultimately represent for Jenkins? Hopefully, it means no worries for the rest of his days – and better movies, too.