Idris Elba fights a lion. This is what Beast promises, and this is what Beast delivers. No more. No less. The purity of it — the bald-faced simplicity! — is sort of beautiful.

This is where we are in the cursed summer of 2022. We quaver with existential ennui as the planet tries to throw us off with pandemics, heatwaves, wildfires, landslides, dust storms, droughts and floods. But we can cheer in a whistling-past-the-graveyard way as Idris Elba punches a prodigious pissed-off pussycat in the, well, puss, as if to say, “Not today, Mother Nature! Not today!”

To be fair to the lion, he is absolutely correct to be pissed off: poachers killed his whole family, and tried to kill him too, so he is out for revenge. All homo sapiens are in his sights. You may want to root for the lion instead. We humans are only getting what we deserve.

Faster,...