Beasts of No Nation review: Forget dreams of playing Bond, Idris Elba is ahead of the acting game

Idris Elba's Commandant dances with gusto, tells jokes and produces eloquent grunts that captivate and terrify the boy soldiers under his command, says Charlotte O’Sullivan
Flirtatious father figure: Idris Elba's Commandant is a toxic combination of Oliver Twist’s Fagin, Bill Sykes and Nancy
Charlotte Osullivan12 October 2015

It’s hard to talk about Idris Elba’s latest film without giving a big plug to Netflix. It’s distributing this West African-set war drama and, though the film is showing in Curzon cinemas for a week, it will mostly be seen on people’s laptops and TVs. Which is sad but not that sad. Size doesn’t matter when it comes to great movies and Beasts is a great movie.

The central character is a mischievous pre-teen Agu (Abraham Attah, an unknown from Ghana), whose life is upended when civil war separates him from his parents and siblings. He gets taken under the wing of an anti-government warlord known as Commandant (Elba).

Director Cary Fukunaga took a risk with Attah. Luckily he is superb — he doesn’t pull a single cutesy expression and is well served by a script that opts for realism rather than grand gestures.

Elba is equally impressive. The Commandant dances with gusto, tells jokes and produces eloquent grunts that captivate and terrify the boy soldiers under his command. A flirtatious father figure, he’s a toxic combination of Oliver Twist’s Fagin, Bill Sykes and Nancy. It’s a juicy role, juicily played.

Will Elba ever play Bond? Who cares! Even Daniel Craig knows 007 is a straightjacket (earlier this week he told Time Out he’d rather “slash his wrists” than sign up for another outing). Actors yearn to do the unexpected: it’s Elba, not Craig, who’s living the dream.

Cert 15, 137 mins

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