funny how your expectations can be defeated , and not in good ways .
the ghost and the darkness promised ( at least , it seemed to me to promise ) a hemingwayesque showdown between men and nature .
what it delivered was mystery science theater 3000-level material -- an inadvertently hilarious story that made me scream advice at the characters .
" get new jobs !
" was one line , if i remember correctly .
at the end of the 19th century , col .
patterson ( val kilmer , whose irish accent comes and goes like an african zephyr ) is an engineer who has been hired to build a british railway bridge across the tsavo river in uganda .
he is having immensely stereotypical problems : the natives are restless , his boss is a jerk , and now two man - eating lions are stalking the work camp and killing people off .
patterson tries to handle the situation himself , incompetently , and then turns to charles remington ( michael douglas ) , a hunter of world reknown ( or something like that ) .
the movie stacks the deck so heavily in favor of the lions , they should have gotten top billing and co - starred with siegfried and roy .
they are nigh - invulnerable , as one comic book put it , and this is of course just the excuse the movie needs to have one native after another stepping forth to solmenly recite lines about the power of nature .
give me a break .
the movie has n't got the wherewithal to even begin to exploit such ideas ; it 's just trying to find convenient ways to stall us .
even the lion hunts themselves are idiotic .
get this : remington 's big plan is to build a large scaffold - like structure in the middle of the savannah , sit on it , and wait for the lion to show up .
he does this , and then gets knocked off by a bird .
by the end of the movie , the blood vessels in my palm were all broken open from me pounding my forehead with my hand .
the acting is forgettable .
douglas does a good job of portraying a relatively cracked fellow , but it 's nothing he has n't done before .
kilmer looks like he wishes he were someone else , somewhere else , and the rest vanish into the cinematography .
the camera , by the way , sometimes behaves so stupidly
all by itself that most of the lion attacks are incoherent .
what did i expect from this movie ?
i dunno .
some real excitement , i suppose .
a sense that there were formidable forces on both sides of this equation .
no such luck .
i dug out my tattered copy of hemingway 's " the short happy life of francis macomber " and read that to get the taste of this movie out of my mind .
idiotic the acting is forgettable no such luck behaves so stupidly has n't got the wherewithal an inadvertently hilarious story that made me scream advice at the characters get new jobs