I think the key to figuring out this movie is an early scene in which one of the characters is wearing a Jurassic Park shirt. This must be the filmmakers winking their eye at the audience, letting us know that what we’re about to see is all in jest.
How else to explain a film where the protagonists arrive in South Africa and immediately start bitching about the heat, but they’re all wearing jackets, and sweaters, and hoodies? More importantly, how are we to interpret a movie that introduces the issues of poaching (people who kill lions) and anti-poaching (people who kill people who kill lions, or at least that’s what Beast thinks it is), only to have the antagonist be a maneater (a lion that kills people regardless of their stance on poaching).
This only perpetuates the myth that lions have never met a human they didn’t want to maul (while contributing nothing to the poaching debate). I’m not saying lions follow an animal version of the First Law of Robotics, but they do get a bad rap in the movies, as do sharks — and in that sense, Beast is closer to Jaws: The Revenge than Jaws. Actually, Beast is even worse than Jaws: The Revenge because the latter at least used a mechanical shark, as opposed to the former’s pitiful CGI lion.
All things considered, this is a film that makes you yearn for the simplicity of The Ghost and the Darkness, which made no pretense of being anything other than a Hemingway-lite story about male bonding over hunting big game (and which, though taking many liberties with the source material, had the decency to feature real lions).
Here, however, the hero tricks two other lions into killing the 'evil' lion, not only a gambit that could easily backfire, but also not very nature-friendly. Although coming to think about it, maybe these lions do comply with the second part of the First Law ("A robot [or in this case, lion] may not ... through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm").