Fukunaga is not ready to join the big boys just yet - a disappointingly hollow film

Rating: 5/10 (28 October 2015)

What to take away from this film - Cary Fukunaga wants to play with the big boys, but he shouldn't just yet. There are a number of questionable directorial choices made in Fukunaga's film, but the biggest problem is that the good choices aren't nearly as effective as they should be. Child soldiers, rape, murder, grenades stuck in people's mouths - this should have turned my stomach but I watched the whole thing with indifference and the main thing I've taken away is its excruciating run time and poor pacing.
Beasts of No Nation's first act is very promising - a group of kids are playing with old junk. Its necessary in films like this to establish innocence before we can establish that it has been lost. It goes on a bit too long but we meet our main character Agu, played by the exceptional Abraham Atta, a young actor who excels whenever Fukunaga gives him the opportunity. When his village is sacked by government forces during a civil war, Agu flees and falls in with a battalion of soldiers (including children) led by the fierce Commandant. Idris Elba has been gathering Oscar buzz for this role - he is certainly a good actor, but the Commandant fails to leap out of the screen and be a manipulative father figure like Steve Carell in Foxcatcher or a commanding leader like Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland. Besides Atta, the other highlight comes in the form of Jenny Eagan's costumes - everything ranging from the Commandant's distinctive blue to the warrior who wears nothing but a jockstrap to Agu's evolving outfit are noticeable and do a great deal to telling apart all these interchangeable characters.
Throughout the film, we watch Agu smile as an innocent, and then smile in spite of war, and then smile because of war. It corrupts him and soon he begins to do unthinkable things and almost relish in it. The story has a great deal of potential, but Fukunaga's questionable choices undermine it in places. Battle sequences are shown from multiple angles but from only one side's perspective, making them almost impossible to follow. Bizarre scenes of Elba and his men dancing before a battle and children singing played in the background while the atrocities are committed are tonally inconsistent and make the film messy.Characters are either paper thin or never fully explored - some implications that the Commandant is a pedophile or the mystery of why young Strika doesn't speak are never explained or revisited, instead giving cinematographer Fukunaga more time to frame shots of grass and trees. I could have easily shaved half an hour off this film in the form of unnecessary conversations and framing shots. We get it Cary, we're in Africa. Black Hawk Down and Saving Private Ryan make you feel filthy just watching the characters roll around in the dirt. The dirt and stink doesn't radiate here like in that movie, just highlighting again the Fukunaga isn't ready to join the big boys like Ridley Scott and Steven Spielberg.
More than one "artistic" scene ends up making the whole movie confusing - if Agu hallucinated his mother here, did he hallucinate his brother's girlfriend later? There are some very nice scenes - including a silent empathy extended from Strika to Agu after Commandant molests the latter - but for the most part the film is completely hollow. The film's third act - during which Commandant goes rogue from his leaders and takes his men into the wilderness - is one act too many and wastes its potential. Even its climax, where Agu and the others turn on Commandant and leave him alone and sad, feels completely lacking in feeling and there is no feeling of relief as Agu finally breaks away.