Intermittently excellent but hampered by an exhaustive running time

Rating: 6/10 (16 March 2016)

Since its release consecutively in cinemas and on Netflix - who hold the distribution rights - Cary Joji Fukunaga's Beasts of No Nation has been caught up in controversy. Feeling the traditional 90-day exclusivity to cinemas was being breached with Netflix subscribers also able to stream online, many cinema chains boycotted the film and reduced its circulation to selected independent theatres. This non-traditional form of release could also be blamed for its omission from the Academy Awards, with Idris Elba's Best Actor snub the most glaring eyebrow-raiser in the #OscarSoWhite debate.
Of the film itself, Beasts of No Nation is an intermittently excellent portrayal of child soldiers in an unnamed African country that works best when focusing on innocence lost and the relationship between narrator Agu (Abraham Attah) and his Commandant (Elba), yet hampered by pacing issues and an exhausting running time. Fukunaga has proved himself to be a skilled director already with Sin Nombre (2009) and the first season of HBO's True Detective, with the latter's awkward second season certainly feeling his absence, but while Beasts can be commended for ambition, he is perhaps not ready to join the big boys just yet.
One of the movies biggest strong points is the cinematography, done by Fukunaga himself. With a bleached colour palette that evokes old war photography, Fukunaga finds a way to keep the film grounded in reality while delivering delirious set-pieces. In one particularly memorable sequence, Agu and his comrades, all hallucinating from drugs, raid a village as the visuals turn a trippy purple, heightening the insanity and horror of the senseless brutality on show. Elba really is terrific too, careful to keep his monstrous character toned-down and believable. He is fair and unforgiving, tender and brutal, and his boys worship him. Attah as Agu is equally impressive, and the moments in which the Commandant's veil begins to break is when the film is at its most dramatically powerful.
The main question I had with the movie is why make this movie now? For the most part, Beasts is a series of war atrocities in which only Agu, the Commandant and Agu's mute friend Strika (Emmanuel Nii Adom Quaye) are distinguishable in the crowd, so if the point is that various countries within Africa are routinely devastated by revolutions and government overhauls driven by personal greed or ambition, then I would point you in the direction of Johnny Mad Dog (2008), Jean Stephane Sauvaire's powerful piece tackling the exact same themes. The funny beginning and the gut-churning middle is where the film is most effective, but Beasts drags in its final third, struggling to round up Agu's story in a digestible running- time.