The Ghost and the Darkness: Rating: 2 stars

You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs — or build a railway bridge in Kenya without losing half your workers to a pair of man-eating lions.

The Ghost and the Darkness (1996)
1996 · R · Action
Reviewed May 14, 2007

You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs… and, apparently, you can’t build a railway bridge in Kenya without losing half your workers to a pair of man-eating lions. From a true tale of turn-of-the-century Kenyan carnage comes this movie, starring Val Kilmer as an Irish engineer who has to contend with African heat, worker animosity, and a couple of killer lions that work in tandem to stalk and devour the workers. The story of the Tsavo lion attacks is a fascinating tale of war between humans and animals, but you wouldn’t know it from watching this film; never have lion attacks seemed so boring. I can’t really put my finger on what, exactly, is wrong with this film; it’s like they got the ingredients right, but somehow failed to combine them correctly. The story plods along, punctuated by the occasional bloody cat attack, and just when you’re starting to think about turning it off and going to the zoo instead, along comes utter weirdness in the form of Michael Douglas, rolling his eyes and overacting as a rootin’-tootin’ American hunter who wants to help Kilmer kill the kitties. The casting in general is quizzical (did nobody screentest Kilmer’s Irish accent?), but sticking Douglas in this role is a gaffe as bad as Jon Voight’s South American snakehunter role in Anaconda — Douglas is an actor made for the urban jungle, not the African one. It was all rather amusing, albeit unintentionally, but overall I wouldn’t recommend this film, even for shits and giggles.