Key Takeaways
- Liam Neeson revitalized his career with Taken, becoming an action star.
- Idris Elba starred in survival thrillers like The Mountain Between Us and Beast.
- The Grey grossed nearly $90 million and received critical acclaim.
- Beast will be available on Netflix starting April 7.
Liam Neeson famously earned a second lease on his career thanks to Taken, which introduced him as an aging action star. Over the next few years, Neeson starred in several action films, and he continues to do so to this day. Some of these movies are good, but most aren’t. However, everyone agrees that the streak peaked in 2011, with Joe Carnahan‘s The Grey. It featured Neeson in the role of a sharpshooter who must protect a stranded group of oil-men from wolves in icy Alaska. The Grey was unfairly promoted as a movie in which Neeson punches wolves in the face, but as everyone who has watched it now knows that it was a far more philosophical work than it initially let on. The survival thriller grossed nearly $90 million worldwide and earned excellent reviews. It might have even inspired Idris Elba to make a couple of very similar movies some years later.
The first one was The Mountain Between Us, which was released in 2017. Directed by Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad, the film also featured Kate Winslet, and followed two individuals stranded in the snowy wilderness of Utah after a plane crash. The movie grossed more than $60 million worldwide and is now sitting at a 39% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. Elba’s second survival thriller was released five years later in 2022, and also directed by a non-American filmmaker. That film is heading to a new streaming home soon, where fans of The Grey will find plenty to chew on.
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The movie in question is Beast, directed by Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur, who is returning to the survival thriller genre this year with Netflix’s Apex, starring Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton. In Beast, Elba plays a man who must fight a lion to protect his daughters during a safari in South Africa. The movie was slightly less commercially successful than The Mountain Between Us, grossing $59 million worldwide against a $36 million budget. It earned superior reviews, though, and is sitting at a 68% score on Rotten Tomatoes. The website’s consensus reads, “Want to watch Idris Elba fight a lion? The admirably lean yet ultimately disposable Beast is just the movie you’re looking for.”
Beast will be unleashed on Netflix on April 7. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
