The veteran star plays a U.S. President driving for his life in a film that falls well below the standard of ‘The Long Kiss Goodnight,’ or even ‘Deep Blue Sea.’
The opening minutes of Renny Harlin’s “The Beast” are some of the goofiest we’ve seen on screen in 2026 — and coming a week after both “Digger” and “Verity,” that’s saying something. The latest from this prolific purveyor of schlock features a typically jocular, ornery Samuel L. Jackson navigating a high-tech automobile (the Beast of the title) while attempting to escape a brutal terrorist attack. What’s especially unique about this situation is that the man behind the wheel just happens to be United States President Oscar Palladin (Jackson), while his only surviving Secret Service agent, Taft (Joel Kinnaman), bleeds out in the backseat.
President Palladin jokes, joshes and argues with the voice on the system known as “Command” while speeding through a blighted cityscape, the camera whirling around the interior of the vehicle in a dizzying 360, as Taft gurgles bloodily in the background. Around the 15-minute mark, the sinking realization hits — we’re not exiting this vehicle anytime soon, so we’d better get used to it. The bad news is that “The Beast” doesn’t get any better from there.
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The Beast is less “car” and more “transportation system” — or a “rolling, armored White House on wheels with its own contingency response force,” as we’re informed by introductory text on screen. The Presidential transportation operation is an “intricately choreographed ballet,” and a “dynamic, imperishable illustration of American might,” that has “all just been fucking destroyed” in some sort of vague but extremely violent global attack, the text continues. Now, our potty-mouthed POTUS finds himself in the driver’s seat, deploying the combat skills he acquired in Vietnam, as well as the Zen practices he learned from his wife, in order to get himself to safety. Swearing helps let off some steam too — there’s a whole aside about his signature delivery of “muhfuher.”
As they attempt to evade anonymous villains on the streets — wielding chainsaws and wearing Halloween “Purge” masks — and dodge dazed and bloodied civilians, the film just feels like a video game: a perverse kind of “Grand Theft Auto: Executive Branch,” with the world outside of the Beast populated with non-player characters. A game, however, has more sense of play and geography. Here, Palladin just drives from one place to another.
The whole enterprise is made up of familiar bits and bobs cribbed from other movies: Jackson pontificating about music and pop culture to a semi-conscious Taft is pure “Pulp Fiction,” while moments where the limitations of the vehicle impede his actions are just like “Speed.” (At one point, while he’s trying to stitch up the pathetic Taft while the Beast is in self-driving mode, he has to touch the wheel every 120 seconds to let it know he’s still there.) The car mostly operates like Alexa, as he barks orders at it, and every now and then, “Command” offers him directions and updates on the happenings outside.
We can lay the movie’s corny conceit at the feet of writer Umair Aleem (“Extraction,” “Kate,” the upcoming “The Beekeeper 2”), who has patched together all these references and then written a script entirely for Jackson’s voice. The film is essentially a high-concept action “geezer teaser” for the 77 year-old star: one in which he gets to sit down and yap for the majority of it.
And does he ever yap. He reminisces about Vietnam and the horrors he experienced there to Taft, explaining his philosophy and coping mechanisms, consoling and comforting the agent with assurances that he’ll make it. Palladin alternates extreme competence and high-level combat skills with full-blown hallucinations and wartime flashbacks, which Harlin visualizes with extreme, wide-lensed closeups. Soon, we realize that the beast — a bloodthirsty young soldier — he sees in the backseat of the Beast, is, well, the part of him that he didn’t want to unleash. Of course, he’ll have to in order to make it out alive.
Harlin and Jackson made some ‘90s action-movie magic with the sharky trashterpiece “Deep Blue Sea,” and an actually good action movie with the Geena Davis vehicle “The Long Kiss Goodnight,” but none of that campy fun is present in this reunion, which is simultaneously noisy, ugly and dull. The visual effects are chintzy, Jackson’s performance is schticky, and even if Aleem’s script is cheesy, Harlin’s execution of it doesn’t elevate the material. “The Beast” is both a boor, and a bore.
