The Beast Review: Headache-Inducing Action Thriller Is Lucky To Have Samuel L. Jackson

What begins as a loud and awkward action movie turns into some hard evidence on the power of Samuel L. Jackson as a movie star.

Published Oct 8, 2026, 1:42 PM EDT

Alex is the Senior Editor of Reviews & Prestige Content, overseeing ScreenRant's film reviews as one of its Rotten Tomatoes-approved critics. After graduating from Brown University with a B.A. in English, he spent a locked-down year in Scotland completing a Master's in Film Studies from the University of Edinburgh, which he hears is a nice, lively city. He now lives in and works from Milan, Italy, conveniently a short train ride from the Venice Film Festival, which he first covered for SR in 2024.

The Beast makes the unfortunate decision to start by highlighting its biggest weaknesses. After an amusingly profane bit of opening text, we're thrown into a chaotic mess of gunfire, explosions, and bodies. A sudden, violent attack on the US President's detail has left his highly coordinated team in total shambles. We follow one Secret Service Agent, Taft (Joel Kinnaman), through a vicious close-quarters fight in the back of the titular Beast, the president's highly armored car. Eventually, it's revealed that the President, played by none other than Samuel L. Jackson, has somehow ended up behind the wheel.

This opening scene is a headache in cinematic form. It's visually unclear, the soundscape is overwhelming, and the effects are just questionable enough to be distancing, rather than immersive. The next couple scenes that follow, which mostly involve Jackson screaming at his team over the phone while even murkier violence occurs outside the car, are more of the same. I began dreading the possibility that the entire film would continue at this volume.

Thankfully, though, it settles down enough to give Jackson something to do aside from being angry behind the wheel. Renny Harlin's The Beast is an exercise in action movie absurdity that requires a certain amount of buy-in to truly enjoy – something I ultimately couldn't muster. But, especially considering where it starts, it gets impressive mileage out of its very limited set-up. At its best, it's an example of the power of a bona fide movie star to hold our attention even as the surrounding film has us wanting to disengage.

Samuel L. Jackson Is The Only Reason To Watch The Beast (& A Pretty Good One)

The Beast is not quite a straight thriller. Though we're thrown into the action with little context, we soon learn that there wasn't much we could have known. This attack on the President was perpetrated by an unknown enemy with a frightening level of intel about the Secret Service's protocols, and the chaos is hardly limited to this one location. Little by little, through periodic check-ins with Command (Eoin Macken), we learn more about the scope of what's going on, and the film picks up an apocalyptic sci-fi tinge to it.

Mostly, though, this is a fairly contained action movie with a clear, if shifting, goal. The President needs to drive his way to safety, and Command has the route already mapped out. The only problem, and this film's greatest asset, is that Jackson is playing the most belligerent commander-in-chief imaginable. It doesn't seem like there's anyone alive who could successfully give him an order, and he routinely calls audibles, putting his own safety at risk for whatever it is he believes needs to be done. That ranges from refusing to drive through a populated civilian area, to getting out from behind the wheel to tend to Agent Taft, who took a bullet or two in the opening skirmish and is losing a lot of blood.

...[Jackson] manages to overcome the opening's missteps through sheer charisma.

Narratively, The Beast alternates between scenes of sudden danger, in which the President discovers just what this vehicle is capable of, and more introspective dialogue between Jackson and Kinnaman. There's a degree of genre heightening to both, which serves the action better than the drama – the way this scenario is treated makes it hard to care about these characters. Taft's injury is so severe from the get-go that Kinnaman barely even has a chance to make a real mark. Still, I have to credit the movie for trying. A good deal of effort is spent on fleshing out the President as a former veteran still haunted by his combat experience, who finds it disconcertingly easy to tap into that skill set once again.

Samuel L. Jackson is the only reason this movie works at all. With minimal but impactful exceptions, he spends The Beast seated behind the wheel of the titular car, and he still manages to overcome the opening's missteps through sheer charisma. He lends some weight to the proceedings, supplies a few genuine laughs, and successfully develops chemistry with a car phone. It's not like we needed more proof of Jackson's stardom, but Harlin's film is most interesting as evidence that some people just have "it," even just sitting in a car.

It wasn't quite enough to save this film for me, which I still found too incoherent for its own good. But I suspect it will be for others. If you're more inclined to enjoy some of the elements of The Beast I bumped on, then there's some fun to be had, especially with Jackson as committed as he is.

The Beast releases in theaters on Friday, October 9.