The Ghost and the Darkness

Hopkins has combined a tightly written script, two superior actors and stunning African vistas into a film that is breathtaking in its beauty and thrilling with suspense. [10 Oct 1996]

A throwback to bygone historical adventures, The Ghost and the Darkness is a classy, high-gloss yarn with sterling production values, fine performances and breathtaking vistas. It’s a literate and eerie true-life chiller that should grab moviegoers who’ve been hungering for adult entertainment. Read full review

The Ghost and the Darkness, a lion-hunting story set in 19th-century Africa, is the rare Hollywood action-adventure that becomes more surprising and exotic as it moves along. While it begins on an unpromisingly starchy note, the film soon picks up speed, color and nicely nonchalant humor as it tells a true story about near-mythic beasts. Read full review

But the director hired for the job was Hopkins, who was responsible for two of the worst action movies of recent years - "Predator 2" and "Blown Away." And sadly, he has chosen to play the material as "Jaws" with Paws - a jump-out-at-you horror movie, and not an especially competent or thrilling one at that. [11 Oct 1996]

The Ghost and the Darkness is beautifuly photographed and produced with an immaculate sense of period. Stephen Hopkins directs the action with a sure hand, but he is understandably at a loss in the film's subtext, which is as dense and often as impenetrable as jungle undergrowth. [11 Oct 1996, p.14]

The Ghost and the Darkness doesn't seem to know what to do with this unsettling bit of history. There is a little bit of Hemingway bullshit about manhood and courage and grace under pressure, but the movie always seems to be reaching for a philosophical/mystical edge that would have been better off in the hands of a director like Peter Weir. Instead, the job went to Stephen Hopkins, whose credits include "Nightmare on Elm Street 5" and "Predator 2," and whose taste for straightforward commercial thrills gets in the way of the stories more interesting possibilities. [11 Oct 1996, p.56]

The movie mostly sustains its excitement of the hunt. But the real star is the panoramic, beautifully composed cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond. Whether he truly loved the African locations or is cursed with "a gift" doesn't matter; the dynamics of the story often flag, but the visuals lend a palpable excitement. [11 Oct 1996, p.49]

You will jump out of your seat then wince at every kill, but you won't leave the cinema thinking you've seen a classic. Which is a crying shame. Read full review

The script by William Goldman (Misery) is based on fact, and when the movie sticks to fact (in an unprecedented bout of man-eating, the lions took just a few months to slaughter 130 bridge builders), the result is a hypnotic spectacle. The natives fear that the lions are unkillable demons. The hunters — Douglas and Kilmer spar splendidly in their roles — aim to prove them wrong. Hopkins, unfortunately, won’t leave well enough alone. Read full review

"I am epic, hear me roar" is what the lion-centered The Ghost and the Darkness would have you believe. The reality is more like an acceptably loud noise than a true roar, but so few films venture into the old-fashioned world of historical action adventures that even a loud noise is a welcome sound. [11 Oct 1996, p.F16]

"Ghost" comes on strong -- there's a crash-bang orchestral score, some romantic dialogue by William Goldman and many calendar shots of the savanna by Vilmos Zsigmond -- but it's hardly an epic. Kilmer's Irish accent is a flickering bulb, and Douglas, with his graying, stringy hair and beard, hams it up like a pirate with scurvy. That said, Goldman's screenplay is sharp and often unexpectedly funny. The lions are fabulously smart and evil, always one step ahead of the macho men's intricate plots to gun them down. And the man-against-beast fight scenes are twist-in-your-seat scary. Suffice it to say you haven't lived until you've dropped your rifle and a lion is chasing you up a tree. "Ghost" is no "Jaws," but it's got plenty of teeth. [21 Oct 1996, p.91]

But the very thing that drew the two actors to this ripping yarn — their enchantment with playing archetypes of male power — is the very thing that undoes their awfully big adventure. Read full review

For those who are interested in observing the habits of real lions and viewing genuine life-and- death struggles in Africa, I direct your attention to The Leopard Son, which is still in theatrical release. That well-constructed documentary has stronger drama, tension, and cinematography than the supposedly-real story told in The Ghost and the Darkness. True, it's missing Tom Wilkinson sneering, Michael Douglas smirking, and Val Kilmer looking bored, but no movie can boast everything. Read full review

At heart, The Ghost and the Darkness is essentially Jaws with paws -- at one point, you can see the lions' silhouettes circling under a sea of roiling dry grass. It has all the requisite elements for a sweeping, old-fashioned jungle adventure -- except the adventure. [11 Oct 1996, p.6G]

Miscast and nervously directed. [11 Oct 1996]

THIS odd, anachronistic movie is the story of a couple of white guys (Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas) messing around in 19th-century Africa, and a couple of lions who want to eat them. I kept rooting for the lions. The Ghost and The Darkness is not a bad movie, and the scenes with the lions are fearsome. But it is so old-fashioned in its view of British Colonial Africa that you keep expecting Stewart Granger to wander in out of "King Solomon's Mines" (1950). [11 Oct 1996, p.3E]

The movie has considerable intensity, particularly when it views hunting as a form of counter-guerrilla warfare, with the gunboys wandering into the thickets, daring the big cats to come bite them and get a bullet for their trouble. It's best trick, though, is a straight steal from "Jaws" in which the lion -- I couldn't tell if it was "Ghost" or "Darkness" -- slides across the savannah in the high grass, just a form in the seething stalks, its tail alone visible, like a fin in the glassy water. There's a primordiality, a natural human fear of things with teeth and fangs, really provoked by that image. Too bad the movie couldn't have checked into that vein more often. [11 Oct 1996]

For all its noble intent, Hopkins' film falls flat halfway through, mired in bad philosophizing and too-beautiful killing fields, neither bark nor bite mean much here. Read full review

It would be a lie to suggest that there aren't some crudely effective moments in Ghost and the Darkness. After all, this is a movie where two man-eating lions pop up every 10 minutes or so, growl and drag off another fresh corpse or two. But crude effectiveness is all the movie has to offer -- and even that is a mark it doesn't always hit. Read full review

Most of these scenes are long, boring shots of the men aiming their rifles nervously into the mist. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is more artfully arranged. Read full review

Douglas prances and chants with crimson-haired tribesmen who look like they were styled by Dennis Rodman. He talks a good game. (Why does he kill? "Because I've got a gift.") But he is trapped by the same undernourished script as the rest of the cast. Secondary characters are fleshed out so little, they should simply wear labels that say "kitty snacks." [11 Oct 1996]

The Ghost and the Darkness could have been an effective film about the virtues of courage for its own sake. But the picture is too lightweight, too posturing and too self-important to go in an introspective direction. Read full review

Some might even say the movie's messages and themes are racist attempts to justify colonialism, but they're wrong; this forgettable movie doesn't have any messages, or anything else, at all.

Kilmer is adequate, though he's always more interesting when allowed to play a character with a dark side; Patterson's too squeaky-clean for Kilmer to exploit the most useful part of his range. [12 Oct 1996, p.4G]

A silly period production, built around the sorry spectacle of two smug American stars lording it over the natives... Based on true events, the film is nevertheless absolutely preposterous, and informed by stereotypes that don't play well in the 1990s. Read full review

“The Ghost and the Darkness is an African adventure that makes the Tarzan movies look subtle and realistic. It lacks even the usual charm of being so bad it's funny. It's just bad. Not funny. No, wait . . . there is one funny moment. Read full review