For a nation obsessed with professional sport, there is a surprising scarcity of Australian sports films. There have been a handful of memorable ones: The Club (1980), The Coolangatta Gold (1984), and more recently, The Final Winter (2007). However, apart from the low-budget 2024 film Life After Fighting—which made less than A$6,000 at the box office—Beast is the first Australian film to venture into the world of mixed martial arts.
Patton James (Daniel MacPherson) is a retired fighter drawn back into the game due to tough circumstances. His young daughter Maddie (Sol Nc Carrico) requires an expensive specialist, his wife Luciana (Kelly Gale) is pregnant, and he barely makes a living working for a petty tyrant on a fishing boat. When the opportunity to earn $150,000 by fighting his former nemesis, world champion Xavier Grau (Bren Foster), arises, he finds it impossible to resist, despite his loving wife's pleas. So Patton returns to his old trainer Sammy (Russell Crowe). Despite some bad blood between them, Sammy and his daughter Rose (Amy Shark, in her feature film debut) help him get in shape for the fight. After several trials and tribulations, the story culminates in a bout in Thailand. "A fight all about redemption, no… revenge," the commentator tells us. Guess the result?
Bland Delivery, Bad Accents
Beast features all the expected clichés, and calling the narrative predictable is an understatement. But for a feel-good "against the odds" sports film, this isn't necessarily a problem. There can be something pleasurable in watching cliché after cliché unfold, and genre cinema's capacity to fulfill our expectations is one reason we keep coming back. However, the problem is that Beast mostly rings as hollow as the characters' names, which could only exist in a scriptwriter's dreams—Patton James and Xavier Grau, really?
Director Tyler Atkins found something charming and fresh in his undeniably sentimental earlier film, Bosch & Rockit (2022). Beast, however, feels stale. Much of this is technical, with many elements not working well together. Russell Crowe is a fine actor, and his revival as an angry, hefty middle-aged man (as in the smashing 2020 film Unhinged) has been effective. But one can't imagine this role stretched him much, and it feels like he's just going through the motions. Similarly, we're consistently aware of the effort TV star MacPherson puts into the lead role of Patton, resulting in a valiant but not entirely convincing performance. Kelly Gale acts like a model as Patton's long-suffering wife, her undeniable presence offset by a strikingly monotone delivery.
The only standouts are screen veterans Matt Nable, excellent as usual in a tiny role as loan shark Barry Dunne; Nathan Phillips, who has a small but memorable role as the skipper of the fishing boat; and Bren Foster, a martial artist-turned actor who commands every scene he appears in.
At Once Unconvincing and Strangely Comforting
The screenplay is dull, co-written by Crowe, who also produced the film. It seems so concerned with coming across as an "Aussie film full of heart" that it ends up without any. There are some unintentionally funny lines, such as what wise trainer Sammy says to Patton when he hears he's taken the fight just for the money: "Time's not a commodity like that. You've got moments and memories. If you don't take the moments, you don't get the memories."
That said, despite being soapy and not very convincing, Beast is quite watchable as a kind of sports telemovie—earnest, if a bit lame. Sure, it runs through the motions, but the motions are compelling enough to warrant a watch for fans of Aussie cheese. There's something eternally pleasurable about watching an against-the-odds sporting movie replete with training montages, even if it is Home and Away's answer to Rocky IV.
Beast is showing on Stan from today.
